The Beinart Notebook

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribeTopics include:* Mark Carney’s speech* the role of University Hillels* the intelligence of Zionists* Gaza and the West Bank today* Report from Minnesota* how we speak of our opponents* weighing truthfulness against political expediency* speaking to progressives and liberals* polling JewsThe monthly AMA live session and full video is a special perk for Premium paid subscribers. Sample Q&A from last month’s session is for everyone. Thanks so much to all for your support at any level.(A Substack glitch fails to distinguish between subscription tiers in these messages. You can review the various options here.)

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Negar Mortazavi, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and host of the excellent Iran Podcast. We’ll talk about the potential for another US and Israeli attack on Iran, how Iranian dissidents view such a move, the role of the Iranian diaspora, and America and Israel’s efforts to boost Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah.Ask Me AnythingOur next Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY, will be this Tuesday, February 24, from 11-12 AM Eastern time.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!), Josh Nathan-Kazis writes about the Jewish community’s reckoning over Les Wexner, patron of Jeffrey Epstein.Muhammad Shehada on how Europe might develop an alternative vision to Trump’s plans for Gaza.My friend, the Swedish writer Goran Rosenberg, has published a beautiful memoir, Israel: A Personal History.Give a Purim gift to Israelis who resist the draft.AppearancesI talked about white Christian nationalism on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNOW.On February 24, I’ll be speaking via Zoom to the Britain Palestine Project.On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, Donald Trump has moved this massive military arsenal to near Iran, and there’s a lot of reports that any day now, the U.S. could launch a military assault on Iran. And when I watch the debate about this kind of thing in the United States, I find it very frustrating, because I find that even people who are against Donald Trump attacking Iran, it seems to me, don’t necessarily raise the most fundamental questions. They say, well, how do we know this would work in overthrowing the regime, or how do we know it would work in eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, or, you know, why hasn’t Congress had a vote on this, or why hasn’t Donald Trump explained it to the American people, or why isn’t he focusing on domestic issues?I mean, all of these are legitimate points to make, but it seems to me, they miss a far more fundamental point, which is: by what right does the United States have to attack a country that clearly poses no threat to the United States, and that the American exceptionalism is so deep in mainstream American political culture that almost never are Americans asked to flip things, and imagine the idea of Iran or China, for that matter, attacking the United States, right? To reverse the lens, the notion that the United States somehow has the right to do things to other countries that we would never, in a million years think it was okay to do to us is just so baked into American conversation. But I think it’s just worth doing the thought experiment, right?Think about the justifications for America’s attack on Iran, right? And think about how they could be applied if a foreign country wanted to attack the United States. So, one is that Iran has this nuclear program, right? Doesn’t have nuclear weapons, but it supposedly has some kind of nuclear program that could be used to make nuclear weapons one day, right? But Iran has done a much better job of complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty than the United States does. Iran actually signed the Obama nuclear deal, which actually went beyond the obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, right?The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty basically says that countries that don’t have nuclear weapons cannot get them, but crucially, it also says that nuclear-armed countries need to move in the direction of disarmament, right? Donald Trump has moved exactly in the opposite direction, right, basically scrapping the remaining nuclear arms control treaties that exist, moving to modernize and build more and more nuclear weapons, right? So, if the claim is that you have the right to attack countries, because they’re not meeting their obligations on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, I think that would be a better justification for attacking the United States than for the United States attacking Iran.The second claim is that Iran represents a threat to its neighbors. Now, it’s true Iran has supported groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah and groups in Iraq that have taken violent actions against Israel or against American troops. But the level of aggression that Iran has been involved in vis-a-vis its neighbors absolutely pales to the degree of aggression that the United States has been involved in vis-a-vis its neighbors, right? The United States literally just sent the U.S. military in to kidnap, to abduct a foreign leader in Venezuela. The U.S. is basically, as Donald Trump has threatened to use military force to take over Greenland. He’s threatened to use, kind of, economic coercion to take over Canada, right?Israel’s also used much more aggression in terms of just the number of bombs that they’ve been dropping, the number of troops they’ve deployed outside of their borders, but if the claim is that you have the right to attack Iran because it represents a threat to its neighbors. Well, ask the people in Venezuela, or Colombia, or Mexico, or even Canada how much of a threat the United States represents to its neighbors; a far greater threat than Iran does.And the third argument that, you know, for the U.S. use of military force against Iran is that Iran is oppressing its own people. Now, again, I mean, if you think that Donald Trump is actually, genuinely concerned about the Iranian people, you just have to have been sleeping under a rock for the last 10 years. I mean, the idea is so absurd, right? We even see in Venezuela that Donald Trump shows no interest in actually trying to support actual democracy in Venezuela. He basically just wants, you know, autocrats who will basically allow him and his cronies to take more oil. So, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that the U.S.’s goal in Iran would actually be to produce a more decent government that treats Iran’s people better, right?But again, if the argument is that you have the right to take military action against Iran, a country that does not, clearly does not threaten the United States, and because it’s doing terrible things to its people, well, the United States under Donald Trump is not as repressive as Iran, you know, towards its… domestically. It’s very repressive. It’s not as repressive as Iran, but if we’re looking at the human rights violations that the United States has committed around the world, right, with eliminating the USAID, which is going to lead to the death of millions and millions of people, right? Or America’s contributions to climate change, which are also going to lead to the deaths of huge numbers of people, as the United States is the largest emitter and basically has refused any efforts to curtail its emissions, right?Again, if the claim is that you have the right to attack countries because they’re committing grave human rights violations, well, again, by that logic as well, people might say that countries have the right to attack the United States. Of course, they don’t have the right to attack the United States, and even raising the conversation in America would make people think that this was an absurd idea. But it is American exceptionalism that prevents us from recognizing that it is just as morally absurd for the United States to bomb Iran as it would be for another country to bomb the United States.We still have so much work to do in the United States in overcoming this legacy of the idea that the United States is somehow on some different kind of moral or legal plane from other countries. If that was ever the case, it sure as heck is not now, right? Nobody—virtually nobody— around the world sees the United States that way, and the Americans have to… we have to stop seeing America that way. Only when we do that, I think, will we be able to address the fundamental problem with this new kind of imperialism that Donald Trump is practicing, which is based on the idea that the United States somehow can hold itself above the laws and moral norms that bind other countries. The United States has no right to do that. And that, it seems to me, is what’s at the most fundamentally wrong with this horrifying impending attack on Iran. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Sabri Jiryis, who for more than half a century has been among the most important Palestinian intellectuals trying to understand Zionism and promote Palestinian freedom. As a young man, he helped found al-Ard, the first Palestinian political movement in Israel, which called for Palestinian national rights and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1966, he wrote The Arabs in Israel, his landmark book on the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the Nakba. In 1970, Jiryis was exiled to Lebanon, where he became a close advisor to Yaser Arafat and director of the Palestine Research Center, the research and publication center of the PLO. In 1977, he published the first volume of his seminal Arabic-language book, A History of Zionism, and followed it up with a second volume in 1986. That book has now been translated into English by his daughter Fida. Following the Oslo Accords, Jiryis was one of the few Palestinians allowed to return to Israel and now lives in his native village, in the Galilee. We discussed his understanding of Zionism, and his extraordinary life.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Sabri Jiryis, who for more than half a century has been among the most important Palestinian intellectuals trying to understand Zionism and promote Palestinian freedom. As a young man, he helped found al-Ard, the first Palestinian political movement in Israel, which called for Palestinian national rights and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1966, he wrote The Arabs in Israel, his landmark book on the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the Nakba. In 1970, Jiryis was exiled to Lebanon, where he became a close advisor to Yaser Arafat and director of the Palestine Research Center, the research and publication center of the PLO. In 1977, he published the first volume of his seminal Arabic-language book, A History of Zionism, and followed it up with a second volume in 1986. That book has now been translated into English by his daughter Fida. Following the Oslo Accords, Jiryis was one of the few Palestinians allowed to return to Israel and now lives in his native village, in the Galilee. We will discuss his understanding of Zionism, and his extraordinary life, on Friday.Reader SurveyWe created a super-short, four question, survey to see how subscribers feel about the Beinart Notebook. If you have 5 minutes, please fill it out. It will help us figure what topics to cover, and what guests to interview, in the coming year. Thanks to everyone who has already filled it out.Cited in Today’s VideoThe open letter claiming that accusing Israel of genocide constitutes a “blood libel.”The letter’s link to one paper published on the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ website accusing Hamas of genocide.The International Association of Genocide Scholars accuses Israel of genocide.Scholars estimate that Israel has killed roughly 100,000 people in Gaza.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!), Daniel May writes about the lessons of Minneapolis’s resistance to ICE.In 972Mag, Sophia Goodfriend explains how ICE is adapting surveillance practices pioneered by Israel.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed Adalah’s Myssana Morany and B’Tselem’s Sarit Michaeli about the forced displacement of Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Naqab/Negev.AppearancesOn February 17, I’ll be speaking on a panel for the World Policy Forum about Muslim-Christian-Jewish Coexistence in the Holy Land.On February 24, I’ll be speaking via Zoom to the Britain Palestine Project.On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, there’s this open letter which has been signed by a bunch of people that accusing Israel of genocide constitutes a blood libel. Some of the initial signatories are the Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Shmuly Yankolovich. I mention them in particular because part of what is so depressing to me, dispiriting to me about this letter, is that these are people who, in other aspects of their lives, I actually think are really, really talented and thoughtful people.I mean, Yossi Klein Halevi—I disagree with his political views—but he’s a very talented narrative journalist. If you read books of his, like, you know, We Were Like Dreamers about the Israeli soldiers in the 1967 war and what happened to them. Yitz Greenberg is one of the most important American rabbis of his generation, really a giant in the kind of field of post-Holocaust theology who shaped, you know, whole generations of Orthodox American Jews. Shmuly Yankielovich, who’s based in the United States, runs an Orthodox organization that, in domestic American politics, on questions of the rights of immigrants, on opposing ICE, has actually done some really, really, you know, wonderful, wonderful work.And so, this letter, to me is a kind of an example of how there’s something about this question, about the question of Israel and the Palestinians that I think takes people’s best qualities—their qualities of intellectual curiosity, and their qualities of empathy—and it kind of drains them. And this letter, I think, is a specimen of kind of what has happened to establishment American Jewish and Israeli discourse.And I just want to explain why I find it so dispiriting. The first point is if you wanted to write an intellectually and morally honest, you know, letter opposing the claim that Israel has committed genocide—you know, and to be fair, genocide is a very particular kind of crime, right? It’s different than crimes against humanity, for instance, right? Genocide has to do with intent. One could make an intellectually honest argument that Israel has not met the standard of genocide. But to be intellectually honest, you would have to start by acknowledging what Israel actually has done, right? That whatever term you claim it meets under international law, just talk about the brute facts of what has happened on the ground, right?The best scholars we have in terms of estimating direct and indirect deaths from war now suggest that Israel has killed 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Remember, Gaza’s not a big place, right? It’s only a bit more than 2 million people. 100,000 people, right? That Gaza has the largest population of child amputees per capita of any place in the world. That 80% of the homes have been destroyed. That 70% of farmland has been destroyed. And the reconstruction is not happening, right? In fact, what’s actually happened is Israel has cut the Gaza Strip in half and now confined people in Gaza in this completely destroyed area, where there’s no concrete coming in to actually rebuild homes. Israel has basically confined that population into only now half of the Gaza Strip.So, if you want to argue this is a genocide, okay, but at least ask yourself what the human cost has been, right? There’s nothing in this open letter which does that at all. This is the closest you get. This is the closest you get. I’m gonna read the sentence. It says: ‘There is a vigorous debate within the Jewish community over aspects of how this war was fought, and that is a sign of moral health. So is our pain over every innocent life lost.’So, you noticed the only acknowledgement of any Palestinian death and suffering at all is turned into a kind of self-congratulatory claim about Jews that actually Jews are so moral because we are pained by this, right? And because we’re having a debate about it, right? So, it’s actually, to me, the very opposite of a kind of moral reckoning with what’s happening, which I think, again, to be honest in arguing against genocide, you would have to have some human reckoning with what actually Israel has done, even if you want to say it shouldn’t be called genocide.The second thing that’s so dishonest about this open letter is that intellectually honest arguments acknowledge the arguments and face the arguments of people on the other side and try to respond to them, right? This letter does not acknowledge that among the groups that have said Israel is committing genocide are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem—an Israeli human rights organization—Physicians for Human Rights, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, right? It doesn’t acknowledge any of that. It doesn’t actually answer their arguments, which have been documented hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports from on the ground reporting from people, you know, in Gaza.And in fact, what’s even more remarkable, is that the authors of the letter claim that Israel has not committed genocide, but that Hamas was trying to commit a genocide. And to support that claim, they link to an essay written by a scholar that was posted on the website of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, right? Now, just think about this for a minute. The International Association of Genocide Scholars, as an organization, has claimed that Israel is committing genocide. This letter never acknowledges that. But to buttress its claim that Hamas was committing genocide, it cites one essay that was published on the website of this organization, while never acknowledging that the very organization whose website they are linking to has actually argued that Israel is committing genocide, right? That’s what intellectual dishonesty looks like.And the third point about the letter is the use of this term, blood libel, right? You could argue that you don’t think Israel has committed genocide. But why on earth call it a blood libel, right? A blood libel: the term comes from the claim in medieval Europe that Christians made that Jews were using the blood of Christian children to bake matzah. That’s where the term blood libel comes from, right?How can anyone seriously argue, right, that a claim of genocide that has been made by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Israel’s own human rights organization, B’Tselem, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—the most well-known human rights organizations in the world—Israeli-born Holocaust and genocide scholars like Amos Goldberg, Omer Bartov, Roz Siegel, Shmuel Lederman. This is the equivalent, you’re claiming, of Christians in medieval Europe saying that Jews were using the blood of Christian children to bake matzah? It’s just completely absurd. It’s an example of just how far down the rabbit hole this kind of establishment pro-Israel discourse has gone.And the use of the term blood libel is designed specifically to make this conversation, to turn it away from a conversation of what Israel’s actually done, and to force it, straitjacket it back into this idea that

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comSari Bashi, is the founder of Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, the leading Israeli human rights group offering legal assistance to Palestinians. She’s also author of the new memoir, Upside-Down Love, about her love affair with a Palestinian professor confined by Israel to the West Bank city of Ramallah.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comEthan Katz is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. He’s the faculty director of the Center for Jewish Studies and co-founder of both the Antisemitism Education Initiative and the Bridging Fellowship Dialogue program.His most recent co-edited book is When Jews Argue: Between the University and the Beit Midrash.He recently wrote an essay for Sources entitled When Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitic? Getting Beyond the Polemics and, while I didn’t agree with all of it, I found it an interesting good faith exploration of these issues, so I invited him to discuss it.

In this age of unfathomable cruelty and suffering, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But I want to highlight one individual, and one campaign, for you to consider supporting. The individual is Abdullah Awwad, a surgeon in the Gaza Strip I interviewed last year. He’s been working for years in horrifying conditions. He’s been accepted to multiple overseas medical programs but needs the money to leave Gaza with his family.The campaign is by Shir Tikvah, the synagogue whose rabbi, Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, I interviewed last week. It’s to raise money for people harmed by ICE’s assault on the Twin Cities. Please consider supporting both of these efforts.This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Sari Bashi, founder of Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, the leading Israeli human rights group offering legal assistance to Palestinians. She’s also author of the new memoir, Upside-Down Love, about her love affair with a Palestinian professor confined by Israel to the West Bank city of Ramallah. We’ll talk about her story of love in the face of institutional oppression, and about Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian movement, particularly in Gaza, where despite a so-called “cease-fire,” Palestinians remain largely unable to enter or leave the Strip.Reader SurveyWe created a super-short, four question, survey to see how subscribers feel about the Beinart Notebook. If you have 5 minutes, please fill it out. It will help us figure what topics to cover, and what guests to interview, in the coming year.Cited in Today’s VideoI wrote about patriotism and nationalism for The Atlantic in 2018.How the UAE bribed Trump to give it America’s most sensitive technology.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.)For Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I wrote about Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace.”For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed Jaser Abu Mousa, a 2025 Yale Peace Fellow and past program officer working for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in Gaza, about life and death in the Gaza Strip.For one day, The Nation magazine devoted its entire website to writing about Gaza, by writers from Gaza.After years of disputing the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll numbers, Israel now accepts them.Eve Fairbanks writes about the American right’s nostalgia for apartheid South Africa.AppearancesOn February 9, I’ll be virtually speaking to Our Common Beliefs.On February 12, I’ll speaking at the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University.On Feb 24, I’ll be speaking via Zoom to the Britain Palestine Project.On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.Reader CommentOccasionally, I publish readers’ responses to my videos. Here’s one from Deborah Seligsohn, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Villanova University, about my criticism of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for its criticism of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s suggestion that a child in Minnesota may one day write a book like Anne Frank’s.“I went to the US Holocaust Museum with my Dad (whose father had died in a concentration camp), an incredibly moving experience. I can’t remember exactly when we went, except that I was carrying my baby in a front pack, and that I think for both of us being able to hold on to precious new life was emotionally what got us through. But what I also remember, which is why I want to mention it to you, is that there was an exhibit about the abuses in Bosnia (and this had to be before Srebrenica - it was probably November 1994 that we went, and Srebrenica was July 1995). The Museum was making a direct analogy to the holocaust. So, if they are now saying that analogies are always impermissible, that is a new point of view or more likely a rather selective one. My recollection of the museum was that you started at the top with the 1930s and worked down through 3 levels that end with the death camps, and then there is another level below that is about other genocides - or at least it was when I went - and that area was about Bosnia. When I look at their website, they have a huge section on other genocides in their genocide prevention section. What is striking there is that genocide is pretty broadly construed, except with the glaring missing discussion of the Palestinians.”See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, this was a somewhat difficult evening, for me on Sunday evening as my hometown New England Patriots lost in the Super Bowl. But, actually, the word patriots got me thinking earlier in the week because I was looking for some merchandise about the New England Patriots and, when I was searching online, what I noticed was that if you search up, kind of, hats or t-shirts with the word ‘patriots,’ you get a lot of MAGA stuff—that this word ‘patriot’ is actually a very MAGA-coded word.On the national Sirius radio network, for instance, the conservative channel with people like Sean Hannity and all these other guys is called the Patriot Radio Network. And I was thinking there’s something very strange about the fact that the term patriot is so coded as a right-wing MAGA word because Donald Trump is so obviously not a patriot. He’s the least patriotic president probably we’ve ever had. And, you know, if patriot means that you put your country above yourself, right, Donald Trump clearly does the opposite in these really blatant ways.So, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that a sheikh connected to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates had put a huge amount of money into Trump’s cryptocurrency business, and then as president Trump turned around and gave the UAE these very advanced microchips that the United States had never been willing to give the UAE before, right?So, basically, a bribe where you put money in Trump’s pocket, and he does something that at least his predecessors didn’t think was in the national interest. Or this insane story where, basically, Trump is saying the federal government won’t pay for the continual building of this rail network between New York and New Jersey unless they rename Penn Station after Donald Trump. So, Donald Trump has claimed very clearly his ego is more important than whether people in New York and New Jersey basically have good rail service. So, this is the antithesis of patriotism.And so, it’s an interesting question why is it that this term, ‘patriot,’ is so coded as a MAGA right-wing word when the embodiment of MAGA is so clearly not a patriot? And I think one reason perhaps is it’s based on a kind of confusion between the idea of patriotism and nationalism. One way of thinking about that difference, although there are others, is that nationalism means putting your country above other countries. And so, Donald Trump is, in a certain sense, a nationalist, right? I mean, he’s very hostile to global cooperation. His general view is that international affairs are zero-sum, and he wants to make weaker countries knuckle under to the United States.But that patriotism is different than nationalism. Patriotism is not about the relationship of your country to other countries. It’s about the relationship of the individual to the country, right? And about the question of whether the individual will sacrifice their own self-interest for the collective good.One way of thinking about this difference, actually, is to compare the slogan that Trump had—‘America First’—to the slogan that John McCain had when he ran in 2008, which was ‘Country First,’ right? So, you know, Trump’s slogan, ‘America First,’ is based on the idea that supposedly these other politicians haven’t put America first because they’ve cared too much about other countries. God forbid they, you know, they were concerned about people dying of treatable diseases in Africa or something like that, right? And Donald Trump will have no moral obligation whatsoever to any country other than the United States.But what McCain was saying by ‘Country First’ was something very different. It wasn’t about America’s relationship with other countries. It was about the relationship of the individual to the country, and he was kind of holding himself up as an exemplar of the idea that people should make sacrifices for the country. And even though I disagreed with a lot of John McCain’s political views, he clearly had made tremendous sacrifices for the country. He’d been tortured in a, you know, North Vietnamese prison when he served in the U.S. military during Vietnam. And Trump mocked him for that, right, because Trump really has no ability to understand, to imagine why anyone would actually put the collective good—the national good in this case—above their own self-interest. For him, that just makes you a sucker and an idiot, right? But John McCain was actually talking about patriotism when Donald Trump is talking about nationalism.And so, my hope is that people will better understand the difference of these terms, and that we may come to a day in the future in which I can celebrate the success of my hometown New England Patriots, and that progressives actually can celebrate the reclaiming of this term, patriot, because I think it’s clear today that progressives, in their willingness to sacrifice for the collective good—we see it, you know, in most extraordinary terms in Minnesota, but all over the place—are showing much, much deeper degree of patriotism than Trump and his cronies, who are basically willing to sell out the interests of the country in order to flatter their own egos and put money in their pockets. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, lead rabbi of Shir Tikvah, a “justice-seeking, song-filled” congregation in South Minneapolis. With a background in organizing for migrant rights, she has bridged faith and activist communities locally and nationally to confront the Trump administration’s ongoing siege of Minneapolis, including by co-convening a recent gathering of over 650 clergy in the city.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, lead rabbi of Shir Tikvah, a “justice-seeking, song-filled” congregation in South Minneapolis. With a background in organizing for migrant rights, she has bridged faith and activist communities locally and nationally to confront the Trump administration’s ongoing siege of Minneapolis, including by co-convening a recent gathering of over 650 clergy in the city. We’ll talk about the role of religious leaders in general— and the Jewish community in particular— in the struggle to defend human rights and the rule of law in Minneapolis.Cited in Today’s VideoMinnesota Governor Tim Walz’s comparison of undocumented children in Minnesota to Anne Frank.The attacks on Walz’s comparison by the head of the Anti-Defamation League, the Holocaust Museum in Washington and Donald Trump’s antisemitism envoy.Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe “Boogie” Yaalon’s claim that “the ideology of ‘Jewish supremacy,’ which has become dominant in the Israeli government, reminds one of the Nazi racial theory.”Zach Foster on the long history of Israelis comparing other Israelis to the Nazis.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, Arielle Angel talks to three organizers from Minnesota.On February 3, I’ll be speaking at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.On February 9, I’ll be virtually speaking to Our Common Beliefs.On February 12, I’ll speaking at the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University.On Feb 24, I’ll be speaking via Zoom to the Britain Palestine Project.On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.On March 8, Smol Emuni (the Religious Left) will hold a conference in New York.Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is a finalist for PEN America’s John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, on January 24th, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, observing what ICE and Border Patrol have been doing in his city, which is just terrifying so many immigrant families that their children are unwilling to leave the house, he wrote, ‘we have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Aunt Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.’So, after that, Walz was attacked by the Anti-Defamation League and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and Trump’s antisemitism envoy for having kind of desecrated the history of the Nazi Holocaust by invoking Anne Frank’s name to talk about what happened in Minnesota, even though Tim Walz was not saying that children in Minnesota were being sent to death camps. He didn’t say anything like that. He simply was saying that there were children who were hiding in their homes, and that perhaps one of those children would be writing a diary that people would [read about some] day.I mean, it’s just important to make—this should be an obvious point—but not every comparison with the Nazis is to suggest that the thing being compared to the Nazis is involved in a process of mass extermination. The Nazis did many, many things in addition to the mass extermination of Jews, and Roma, and LGBT folks, and others, right?But these organizations, the ADL, the Holocaust Museum, right, basically don’t want to use the example of the Holocaust to suggest that something terrible is happening in Minnesota. They’re much less concerned about the massive human rights abuses and massive violations of the rule of law that are happening in Minnesota and across the country than in maintaining the claim that nothing can be compared to the Holocaust, or at least no other human rights abuses can be compared to the Holocaust, because they have no problem, for instance, comparing the Iranian regime with the Nazis, if that serves Israeli foreign policy.Interestingly, a few days after Walz’s comments, there was another analogy to the Holocaust, and this came from Moshe “Boogie” Yaalon. Boogie is his nickname. Boogie Yaalon is not a leftist radical. He was actually the chief of staff of the IDF. And then he was Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense minister from 2013 to 2016.And this is, I’m going to read you snippets of the translation of what Boogie Yaalon wrote. He wrote: ‘on the last Tuesday evening, I participated in an event marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. When I got home, I received a message about Jewish pogromists attacking Palestinians in southern Mount Hebron, stealing their sheep, and burning their property.’ And then he writes, “you can’t compare.”He goes on: “After ambulances, which tried to reach the scene were delayed by the Jewish terrorists, three Palestinians were evacuated to the hospital, one of them suffering from skull fractures.” And then he says, “no one can compare to the Holocaust that’s happened to us.” You see, he’s actually mocking groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Holocaust Museum in there, who get more upset about analogizing things to the Holocaust than they do, actually, to brutal attacks on people’s dignity.And he goes on: “To this day, no Jewish terrorist has been arrested because Israel’s police is controlled by a convicted criminal, a racist and fascist Kahanist. The Shin Bet is controlled by representatives of Jewish supremacy.” And then he goes on: “the ideology of Jewish supremacy, which has become dominant in the Israeli government, reminds one of the Nazi racial theory.” And then he goes on: “but it’s forbidden to compare.” And he goes on: “I commanded the”… he talks about all the parts of the Israeli military forces that he commanded. He said, “I knew the warnings of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz against the process of moral coarsening to the point of turning us into ‘Judeo-Nazis.’” That was Leibovich’s phrase. And then he says, “as of today, Prof. Leibowitz was right, and I was wrong.”Now, I think none of these organizations, you know, the Holocaust Museum, Anti-Defamation League, Trump’s antisemitism envoy, none of them will have the guts to actually attack Boogie Yaalon for this Holocaust comparison, right? Because, in reality, if you are Israeli, you can get away with making these comparisons all the time. And, in fact, there’s a list by the writer Zach Foster just of the enormous number of times throughout Israeli history, in which Israeli leaders have compared Israeli policies, or other Israeli politicians, or tendencies to the Nazis. It happens all the time, right?But the real divide here is between people who feel that the memory of the Holocaust against Jews should be used in order to try to defend the rights of vulnerable people who were being abused and persecuted and brutalized, even if, of course, they’re not being abused and brutalized and persecuted in exactly the same way or to the same extent that Jews were when they were slaughtered, 6 million of them, and people who essentially want to segregate off the question of the Holocaust, and who are more offended by the idea of people invoking the Holocaust in order to defend the human rights and human dignity of people than they are by the attacks on the human dignity of those people themselves. And that’s where the American Jewish leadership is today.And it’s striking that they are so morally coarse, even in the wake of Israel having committed what human rights groups now call a genocide, even in the wake of Donald Trump committing human rights abuses in the United States, which are truly jaw-dropping in how frightening and profound they are, that still, the American Jewish leadership is more upset about Holocaust analogies than it is by the actual abuses themselves. Whereas Boogie Yaalon—to his credit—is just fed up with this stuff, and calling b******t on it, and I think it’s really refreshing to see. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comDaoud Kuttab is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and author of State of Palestine NOW. He supports two states, because “the most urgent and doable solution now is the creation of an independent state of Palestine that can live at peace with Israel.”His brother, Jonathan Kuttab is a co-founder of the human rights groups Al Haq and Nonviolence International and author of Beyond the Two State Solution. He believes two states “is no longer feasible.” He therefore supports “solutions that truly address the fundamental issues and the needs of all parties, including settlers, and Palestinian citizens of Israel, which the two-state solution failed to do.” This week, Daoud and Jonathan offered their competing perspectives.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Last week’s guests were two Jewish brothers who disagree politically. This week, the intra-family disagreement will be between two Palestinian brothers. Daoud Kuttab is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and author of State of Palestine NOW. He supports two states, because “the most urgent and doable solution now is the creation of an independent state of Palestine that can live at peace with Israel.” His brother, Jonathan Kuttab is a co-founder of the human rights groups Al Haq and Nonviolence International and author of Beyond the Two State Solution. He believes two states “is no longer feasible.” He therefore supports “solutions that truly address the fundamental issues and the needs of all parties, including settlers, and Palestinian citizens of Israel, which the two-state solution failed to do.” Daoud and Jonathan will offer their competing perspectives on Friday.Ask Me AnythingOur next Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY, will be this Wednesday, January 28, from 11-12 AM Eastern time.Cited in Today’s VideoParshat Bo in the Book of Exodus.Donald Trump’s interview with the New York Times.Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos.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 reports on whether congressional candidate Brad Lander can recreate Zohran Mamdani’s coalition between liberal and anti-Zionists.In The Guardian, I argued that Donald Trump is just the latest president to fall in love with war.In Haaretz, Libby Lenkinski asks whether the Netanyahu government will destroy independent cinema in Israel.Former Clinton official Abby Ross argues that it’s time to disband NATO.Because of bad weather, my talk to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina has been rescheduled from January 26 to March 9 and the subsequent fundraiser for Gaza has been rescheduled from January 27 until March 10.On February 3, I’ll be speaking at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.On February 12, I’ll speaking at the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University.On March 3, three descendants of Americans punished during the red scare will discuss America’s new McCarthyism.On March 8, Smol Emuni (the Religious Left) will hold a conference in New York.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, there’s this famous line by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach where he says that Torah is a commentary on the world, and the world is a commentary on Torah. By which I think he meant that we see new things in Torah, just as people could see new things in any religious text, because of our life experience, because of what we see happening in the world in our time. And, I thought there was a kind of interesting illustration of this in last week’s Torah portion in the book of Exodus, Parshat Bo, which is particularly powerful to read in the age of Donald Trump.There’s one particular line. It’s during the last of the three plagues in Egypt. And Moses and his brother Aaron go to Pharaoh to announce the eighth plague, the plague of locusts. And when Pharaoh still refuses to allow the Israelites to go, to leave, the text says that ‘Moses turned and left Pharaoh’s presence.’ And the medieval commentator, ibn Ezra, interprets this phrase as suggesting that Moses left Pharaoh’s presence without Pharaoh’s permission, which, for an all-powerful ruler like Pharaoh, was potentially, risked death. There’s a bit of a parallel between the line we read in the book of Esther, in which Esther enters the presence of the Persian king without his permission, also an act punishable by death.And this is considered an act of tremendous courage, and it’s considered a kind of defiance, not only of Pharaoh’s tyranny, but of Pharaoh’s idolatry. Because in Jewish tradition, the fact that Pharaoh considers himself a god is intimately linked with Pharaoh’s tyranny and brutality. And so, to suggest that Pharaoh is not all-powerful, that Pharaoh doesn’t have some kind of divine status is not only part of a struggle for freedom, but it’s actually a rejection of idolatry itself. And so, Pharaoh becomes a kind of anti-model for the Jewish kings in the Hebrew Bible who are required to write a Sefer Torah, to write a kind of book of law, to show that they are not the law there, that the law binds them, and indeed, that they are not God.Now, Donald Trump, in his own kind of more modern secular language, also, I think, suggests often that he is a kind of a divine figure, right? He said to the New York Times recently that basically he is bound by no law other than his own sense of morality, kind of warped as that sense is. He also said, in speaking about his first year in office, or in his first year since returning to office, he said, God is very proud, right? So, if Donald Trump doesn’t explicitly think that he is God, he thinks that he should be bound by no domestic or international law, and that he has some kind of access to the mind of God. And so, I think you again see the message of Torah in that this linkage between idolatry and tyranny.There’s another interesting moment in Parshat Bo, after the ninth Plague, the Plague of Darkness, where there’s this very surprising line where the Torah says that Moses was much esteemed in the land of Egypt, which might seem very surprising. After all, Moses has defied the leader of Egypt, and is the leader of a slave rebellion, essentially. And yet, near the end, by the 9th or the 10th plague, it says that Moses was much esteemed in the land of Egypt.And I found that very resonant today, thinking about the way in which different people deal with Donald Trump, right? Think about figures like J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, right? These people who essentially are on perpetual bended knee towards Donald Trump, right? We know what they actually think of Donald Trump, because they, like so many other Republican politicians, when they didn’t fear Trump so much, they said what they thought of Donald Trump, which is pretty much what most of the rest of us think about Donald Trump: that he’s a liar, that he’s an idiot, and that he’s a would-be tyrant. He’s also a rapist, and a cheat, and many other horrible things. But they knew these things because these things are obvious, right?But now, in order to gain access to power, they act as the most fawning kind of sycophants, right, towards Donald Trump. And so, in doing so, they really lose, I think, the respect of even many, ultimately, in their own party. Maybe those people won’t say so, because they’re afraid too, right? But I think they’ve really surrendered their self-respect, whether they recognize it or not.Contrast that with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, right? Who, at Davos, gave a speech that publicly defied Donald Trump, really said things that many other foreign leaders feel, but were unwilling to say about what Trump has meant for the destruction of any notion of international law in the world. And you saw that Carney got a standing ovation, that he’s gotten widespread admiration, just like Moses had, you know, had the admiration not just of his own people for defying Pharaoh, but kind of very broad admiration for his attributes of courage and self-respect that we see that Carney’s courage and self-respect actually wins him many, many admirers across ideological divides and across nations.And I think this is really the model for those of us in the United States: the model of Moses, the model of Carney, which is to never, ever cower, to never, ever self-censor, to defy Donald Trump again, and again, and again, to laugh at him, to ridicule him, to oppose him in every way we possibly can in accordance with the rule of law. And also to recognize that people outside the United States, whether they’re foreign individuals, or indeed foreign leaders, like Carney, or like the leaders in South Africa, who defy Donald Trump—if they’re defying Donald Trump in the name of human dignity, in the name of the rule of law, they are our allies, even though we are in foreign countries. And that it is not anti-American to try to work with foreign governments in order to oppose the tyrannical and destructive policies of Donald Trump, any more than it was anti-South African for South Africans to ask countries to oppose apartheid, or that it is anti-Russian when Russian dissidents ask foreign countries to oppose the war in Ukraine, or that it is anti-Iranian when Iranian dissidents ask other countries to denounce their theocratic regime.That there is actually the best understanding, the best definition of what it means to be truly American—to be a patriotic American—is actually to stand up for America’s best traditions of human freedom, and of the rule of law, and to do so in alliance with anyone—anyone in our own country, anywhere around the world—who also cherishes those values. I think that’s what we see people doing on the streets of Minnesota right now, and their struggle is really a model for those of us all around the nation.And that this struggle, I think the lesson of this week’s Torah portion, is that this struggle, this model of courage, is not only essential in struggles for freedom, they are essential to self-respect. That what is on the line in the way that we respond to Donald Trump is not only the survival and fate of American democracy, of American freedom, of the rule of law, it is our self-respect as a nation. It is our self-respect as Americans. How can we respect ourselves if we act in the cowardly, subservient way that people like Vance and Rubio and Cruz are doing? But if we act in the opposite way, and we speak truth, even recognizing that there are potential dangerous consequences, we maintain our self-respec

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guests are brothers Yehuda and Joel Beinin and the director of the 2025 documentary about them, Holding Liat. On October 7, 2023, Yehuda’s daughter, Liat Atzili, was abducted by Hamas, and spent 54 days in captivity in Gaza before being released. Yehuda’s son-in-law, Aviv Atzili, was killed. In the film, Yehuda and Joel offer different understandings of the political context in which October 7 occurred. I asked them to elaborate on their views, and to talk about how an ideologically diverse Jewish and Israeli family grapples with an experience of terrible trauma.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comCherien Dabis is an actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. In March 2022, Dabis was named Laureate for Cultural Excellence by the Takreem foundation for her work on authentic Arab representation in Hollywood.Dabis produced, wrote, directed, and acted in her latest film, All That’s Left of You. It follows a Palestinian family across three generations.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern time. Our guests will be two brothers, Yehuda and Joel Beinin. Yehuda is a landscape architect in Kibbutz Shomrat in northern Israel. Joel (“Joey” to his family and friends) is Emeritus Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. On October 7, 2023, Yehuda’s daughter, Liat Atzili, who lives in Kibbutz Nir Oz, was abducted by Hamas, and spent 54 days in captivity in Gaza before being released. Yehuda’s son-in-law, Aviv Atzili, was killed in the October 7th attack. The experience of Liat and her family are recounted in the 2025 documentary, Holding Liat. In the film, Yehuda and Joel offer different understandings of the political context in which October 7 occurred. I’ll ask them to elaborate on their views, and to talk about how an ideologically diverse Jewish and Israeli family grapples with an experience of terrible trauma.Cited in Today’s VideoNoam Chomsky vs David Frum on human rights.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!), Eric Baker argues that to preserve academic freedom, US universities should cut their ties to the US military.972 Mag chronicles the spike in emigration from Israel.Nader Hashemi on potential US strikes on Iran.On January 19, I’ll be speaking at the Free University of Brussels.On January 26, I’ll be speaking with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by people in Gaza, which serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Ninety-nine percent of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).On February 12, I’ll speaking at the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, one of my favorite things is when I get emails from people who disagree with me but have a genuine kind of question or argument they want to make. You know, it’s very different than when people just kind of email to say, you know, what an a*****e I am. But, you know, people who have, like, a genuine argument that they want to hear responded to.And I got an email like that the other day, and it was kind of in the wake of these demonstrations in Iran. And the person said, about progressives, he said, ‘I often see intense focus on Israel without proportional attention to severe human rights violations in Iran, China, Russia, and elsewhere.’ And it’s a really, really important point, I think, to answer. And, and it’s a debate that’s been going on for a long time.And his question reminded me of this remarkable video, this remarkable clip, of a conversation decades ago between Noam Chomsky and David Frum—Chomsky and Frum, of course, both much younger at that time. David Frum was quite a young man but still appears to be having some of the kind of hawkish tendencies that he became later well known for. And, in their interaction, Frum says, when we think what we focus on as Americans in terms of our foreign policy concerns, Frum says there should be, ‘an equality of corpses,’ by which he means we should treat all deaths in which people are killed by a regime equally, irrespective of who does it.And Chomsky argues no. Chomsky says, actually, we should care more about those deaths that are committed with American participation, with American complicity. Not, of course, because the lives matter more, but simply because we have a greater moral obligation because we participated in their killing. And Chomsky says, ‘it’s a very simple ethical point. You’re responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions. You’re not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else’s actions.’And I think this is something that we kind of intuitively kind of understand if we take it out of the realm of foreign policy and just think about interpersonal, you know, interactions, right? If I am, God forbid, beating up on someone, I have a greater responsibility to stop doing so than I do to stop my neighbor who is beating up on someone, partly, again, because I am the one who’s committing this despicable action.It’s also, just as a practical matter, a lot easier for me to stop that action than me to stop the neighbor, right? Again, I may well also have an obligation to do something about what my neighbor is doing, but it’s a much more complicated business. I have to literally go, what am I gonna go kind of fight my neighbor to make sure my neighbor is not fighting against the other person? That might well be a valuable thing to do, but in the hierarchy of things that I should do, if I have a limited amount of time, the first thing I should do is to make sure that I am not beating up on anybody.And Chomsky cites the great Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov as an example. It’s a really, really interesting point to make because Sakharov is rightly a hero—was a hero—to hawks in the United States, right, hawks in the United States who love to talk about the Soviet Union’s human rights abuses, but didn’t like to talk about the human rights abuses of the United States, was complicit in all around the world during the Cold War.And Chomsky kind of turns it around and says, if you notice, Andrei Sakharov is not talking about America’s human rights abuses. He’s talking about the human rights abuses in the Soviet Union because they’re the ones that he is complicit in, right? And so, he’s saying Sakharov should be a model for us, which is that Sakharov focuses on the human rights abuses that he, as a Soviet citizen, is responsible for because he, through his tax dollars, is paying for them.Again, none of this is to say that we should not care about people who are being killed, brutalized in Xinjiang under Chinese, what the U.S. is called genocide in China, or Russians suffering under Vladimir Putin, or certainly these very brave Iranians who are risking their lives to overthrow this horrifying regime. We should care about them deeply. And to the degree that we can do something positive in accordance with our best understanding of what they want us to do, we should do that.But if the question is, is it wrong to focus more attention on what Israel has done in Gaza than what Iran is doing to its own people, Chomsky’s answer—which I find convincing—is yes, it is morally justifiable because Israel’s crimes are being committed with American weapons. And the Iranian regime’s crimes are not being committed with my tax dollars. And so, there is a clear moral argument: All human beings’ lives are equally valuable. All tyranny is equally wrong.But when you think about what you can do, Chomsky’s argument, which is that you should focus first on the things that you, as an individual, because of the country in which you live, are responsible for because you are paying for them, I think that argument is convincing. And I think it’s important to distinguish that argument from the argument that defends human rights-abusing regimes just because they’re anti-American. I have no sympathy for that kind of apologia whatsoever. But that kind of apologia, which denies terrible human rights abuses in Iran or China or Russia or Venezuela, is fundamentally different from an argument that says all human rights abuses are horrendous, but it is ethically understandable that we would focus first and foremost on those human rights abuses for which we are personally responsible. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comTrita Parsi is an expert on Iran, author, and executive vice president of The Quincy Institute. I asked him to help make sense of the current situation in Iran.

Note: Apologies for the poor video quality here. I’m making do with spotty WiFi. A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.There will be no Zoom call this week. We’ll return next week.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 reports on efforts by Israeli universities to lure American Jewish students alienated by pro-Palestinian activism on American campuses.Last week, I spoke on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue in New York.On January 19, I’ll be speaking at the Free University of Brussels.On January 26, I’ll be speaking with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by the people of Gaza, which serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Ninety-nine percent of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).See you next week,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, there are really remarkable protests taking place in Iran, and I think the first thing to say about them is that they deserve the support of progressives because progressives should care about human rights.And there are pro-American regimes that can commit horrific violations of human rights, and there are anti-American regimes that can commit horrific violations of human rights. This is not a new story. You can go back to Joseph Stalin to realize that’s the case, and also to see that there have been times historically, where some progressives have forgotten that, and judged regimes less on the way they treat their people than how they treat the United States. And that seems to me, it’s as wrong to give countries a pass when they brutally violate human rights because they’re anti-American, as it is to give them a pass when they brutally violate human rights, because they’re pro-American, if you’re someone who cares and believes in the universality of human rights.But saying that the Iranian protesters were protesting against this really, really autocratic and brutal regime deserve the support of progressives around the world—all people around the world—doesn’t answer the question of what the United States should do. It’s really important to remember that just because people hate their regime doesn’t mean they want a foreign country to attack their regime, let alone occupy their regime.You know, many Iraqis—probably most Iraqis—loathed Saddam Hussein. It didn’t mean that they wanted the United States to occupy Iraq. And the United States learned the hard way—or those Americans who didn’t know beforehand learned the hard way—that Iraqis could both loathe Saddam Hussein and also loathe and fight against an American occupation.And it’s also just important to remember that even if you could establish—and I don’t know how one could establish—the fact that Iranians might want some kind of American military intervention in their country, that there are questions of international law here that have global repercussions, right? Which is to say, even if you could establish that people in a certain country wanted, you know, wanted an attack by another country—and again, I don’t know how you would do that—one of the things we’ve clearly learned in the last 20-25 years is the way in which when one country, when the United States gives itself the right to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of another country, that emboldens other powers, you know, China and Russia in particular, to do exactly the same thing.It’s different when you have the support of the United Nations, right, because support of the United Nations suggests that you have, essentially, some kind of consensus among many countries around the world. Then that is a check on the inclination of various powers—the U.S. in Iraq, or, you know, Russia in Georgia, Ukraine—to basically come up with some spurious claim to justify its imperial interests, right? So, it would be one thing if there was some kind of international UN support for some kind of intervention in Iraq. But I think that’s fundamentally different than the United States doing it on its own.And the other thing I think is worth thinking about when we think about what we would want if we were Iranians, what kind of support we might want from countries around the world, is to imagine ourselves in their shoes. And I actually think that’s a little bit easier for many Americans than it was before Donald Trump. Now, obviously, the United States remains a much, much freer country than Iran does. But it doesn’t take that much imagination to imagine that if Donald Trump got his way, he could move the United States towards being the kind of really brutal dictatorship that Iran is today—a country that would literally not just kill the occasional person in ICE raids in Minneapolis, but actually might kill hundreds and hundreds of people on the streets. I think anyone who thinks Donald Trump is incapable of that is completely delusional, right?So, I think one of the questions that Americans should ask ourselves is: were we in the desperate circumstances that people are in Iran in today, in open revolt on the streets against our government, what would we want other governments to do? How would we want them to respond? I suspect that most Americans would welcome statements of support, and might even welcome certain kinds of targeted sanctions, if they were aimed at the regime and not the population at large. But even in those extreme circumstances, Americans would be very, very reluctant. Even the Americans who hate Donald Trump the most would be very, very reluctant to support foreign military intervention in the United States.And in a way, I think this thinking about this, thinking about Americans in the situation of Iranians, is a way of kind of countering some of the American exceptionalism that has done so much damage to American foreign policy in recent decades, and to American domestic policy: the thinking that Americans are somehow immune from what happens in other countries. And thinking about what we would want were we in the position of Iranians, I think can help us sort through this challenging question of how we emphatically endorse the cause that Iranians are fighting for, but also show wisdom and humility, and don’t succumb to lawlessness when we think about how the United States can support those efforts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is one of the foremost scholars of US policy towards Latin America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian, Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and America, América: A New History of the New World. We talked about how the Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolás Maduro fits into the long-history of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the world.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s zoom call will be at a special time, Wednesday at 1pm ET. Our guest will be one of the foremost scholars of US policy towards Latin America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and America, América: A New History of the New World. We’ll talk about how the Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolas Maduro fits into the long-history of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the world.Cited in Today’s VideoThe attacks on Zohran Mamdani for repealing two orders by Eric Adams related to antisemitism and Israel.The texts of the Israel-related orders Mamdani repealed.A Philosopher for All Seasons, a film about Yeshayahu Leibowitz.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!), Aron Wander and Nathan Goldman discuss Jewish sources about rebuking other Jews.Israel bans Doctors without Borders and other NGOs from operating in Gaza.On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan and on January 26 with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by the people of Gaza, that serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Born from a vow to ensure no neighbor grows hungry, their mission continues in honor of founder Mahmoud Almadhoun, guided by his word, Mostamreen, “we will continue,” said right before he was killed by a drone strike. 99% of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).See you on Wednesday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, Zohran Mamdani has just been inaugurated as mayor of New York and, unsurprisingly, he’s already under attack from establishment Jewish organizations. And these attacks are really predictable and, honestly, they’re really brain-dead, and, in a way, just engaging with them at all is kind of depressing because I think they serve, in a lot of ways, not as good faith arguments, but just basically as a way to, you know, create a political headache and a kind of cloud over Mamdani, and basically make it harder for him to focus on the work that he actually wants to do. But I still think, despite that, it’s worth explaining why these arguments just don’t make any sense. And they’re all basically based on this fundamental incorrect conflation of Jews as a group of people with the state of Israel.So, the first thing that Mamdani did was he repealed an order by his predecessor, Eric Adams, to kind of make the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, kind of encoded in New York City policy and law. And the IHRE definition of antisemitism has very little support from actual scholars of antisemitism, especially scholars who work on antisemitism and Israel-Palestine. Its major supporters are the Israeli government and its kind of allied pro-Israel organizations around the world. And you can see why it has so little scholarly support when you actually look at it, right? You can see why it makes so much sense that actually Mamdani would have repealed it, right?So, it has these examples of antisemitism. So, basically, if you do these things, this is like prima facie evidence that you are antisemitic. One of them is denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination—I’m quoting—e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor. But the State of Israel is explicitly premised on the idea that, basically, that Jews should rule, right? That this is a state for Jews, in which Jews have superior rights to Palestinians.This is not a secret, right? David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, said, this country has to have an 80% Jewish majority, because otherwise Jews couldn’t be sure that Jews would rule. And it was because of this, in large measure, that for more than half of the Palestinians who lived in Palestine under the British Mandate were expelled when Israel was created in 1948 in order to create this large Jewish majority. Many of them were expelled before the Arab armies even attacked Israel in May 1948.And then Israel created a very different set of laws for the Palestinians that remained vis-à-vis, versus those of Jews, right? So Palestinian citizens were under military law from 1948 to 1966. When Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it took control of millions of Palestinians who didn’t have the right of citizenship and the right to vote. It’s for all these reasons that Israel has now been declared an apartheid state by the world’s leading human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and its own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, right?So, it’s not antisemitic to say that Israel has a racist character, that it treats non-Jews—Palestinians in particular—in a fundamentally different way any more than it would be, say, it was an anti-Afrikaner bigotry to say the South African government is based on racist principles. Or if you were to say that the Chinese state, as under the Communist Party, is fundamentally racist because it treats non-Han Chinese people, for instance, in Xinjiang—Uyghurs—in a fundamentally different way. Or if you said that the state of Iran is fundamentally racist because it treats non-Muslims differently than it treats Muslims.Now, one might disagree with these claims, but there’s nothing bigoted about them. You’re not an anti-Chinese bigot if you say the Chinese state under the Communist Party is racist, or you’re not anti-Muslim if you say that the Islamic regime in Iran is bigoted in the way it treats non-Muslims, right? Attacks on the nature of a state are fundamentally different than bigotry towards a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group.A second example in the IHRA definition is, quote, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, right? But again, why is there something antisemitic about comparing Israel to the Nazis? Why is it that we can compare the Trump administration all day and night to the Nazis, and lots of other governments that we think are doing bad things, right, but we can’t compare Israel to the Nazis? Again, the examples may be good, or they may not be, depending on the specific analogy you’re drawing, just as it could be with Trump or not. But why is it an act of anti-Jewish bigotry, right?In fact, there’s a long, long history of Israelis invoking these very analogies. One of my heroes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz—I just watched this wonderful film about him a couple of nights ago—one of Israel’s most important kind of social critics and philosophers and theologians over many, many, many decades, literally was associated with the term, with using the term Judeo-Nazi to describe Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians. He used it all the time, right, as a way of trying to suggest, not that he said that Israel was setting up gas chambers, right, but that there were things that Israel was doing that had something in common with the way the Nazis behaved, just like fascist or authoritarian or racist governments often have certain things in common, right? Yeshayahu Leibowitz, to state the obvious, was not an antisemite, and the fact that he used the term Judeo-Nazi was not evidence that he was practicing antisemitism.The other thing that Mamdani’s under attack for doing is by repealing this order that basically said that New York could not divest from or in any way sanction the state of Israel. And again, but you see in this order that Mamdani has now repealed exactly the same conflation of saying that there’s something anti-Jewish about basically taking policies that would divest city money from the state of Israel. So, the Adams administration order starts by saying: Whereas it is unlawful for an agency to deny our contract because of the actual or perceived race, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or alien or citizenship status of the owners of the bidder or proposer. And then it goes on to say: whereas that, you can’t divest city funds from Israel.But again, this makes no sense, right? If the state of New York were to say, we’re not going to invest anymore our pension funds in Sudan because they’re committing terrible human rights abuses, right? Would anyone say this was an anti-Black bigotry? Or if New York imposed sanctions and divested from China? From all I know, New York may be doing that already. Certainly, the U.S. government has lots of sanctions against countries like Sudan, China, many other countries that accuses of human rights abuses. Would anyone say this was an anti- act of Chinese bigotry? And if the Chinese organizations in New York said, this is anti-Chinese bigotry because you were divesting funds to protest and oppose what China was doing in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, or wherever, would anyone take that claim seriously? No, I don’t think they would make that claim because it’s so ridiculous. And in fact, it would put themselves at risk to associate themselves as an ethnic, racial group in New York City with the actions of this state.Now, the idea of divesting from Israel is based on the idea that Israel is committing grave human rights violations against the Palestinians, and that this would be a tactic, a strategy, in order to try to get to stop doing that. Now, you can debate whether you think Israel is committing those human rights abuses, and whether you think this would be a good strategy to get it to stop. But it has nothing to do with your attitude towards Jewish people because Jew

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Philip Gordon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. We talked about the Biden-Harris administration’s actions regarding Israel and Gaza, Kamala Harris’s statements about Gaza during the campaign, and what policies Democrats should pursue toward Israel-Palestine in the future.

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