The Beinart Notebook

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.

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

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. Our guest will be Philip Gordon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. We’ll talk about the Biden-Harris administration’s actions regarding Israel and Gaza, Kamala Harris’s statements about Gaza during the campaign, how she might have governed as president and what policies Democrats should pursue toward Israel-Palestine in the future.Cited in Today’s VideoBari Weiss pulls a 60 Minutes report on Trump administration deportations to El Salvador.Donald Trump has reportedly said he expects better treatment by CBS now that David Ellenson and Weiss are in charge.Weiss’ Free Press co-hosted a Trump administration inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X.Weiss’ resignation letter from The New York Times.The ACLU denounced Weiss’ efforts to punish pro-Palestinian professors when she was a student at Columbia.The Trump administration leaked the news that it was withholding funds from Columbia to Weiss’ Free Press.Weiss’ support for Israel is reportedly one of the reasons Ellison hired her at CBS.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 talks to immigration expert Samah Sisay about how Trump’s new travel ban targets Palestinians.Tareq Baconi on how the genocide in Gaza radicalized the world.On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.Reader ResponseBenjamin Langer responded to last week’s video about banning the phrase “globalize the intifada.” He writes:The word in the phrase that troubles me is not “intifada,” but “globalize.” If, as you say, “intifada” can mean a call for either violent or non-violent uprising, then globalizing the intifada could mean bringing civil disobedience and political pressure to international spaces, or could mean bringing violence to international Israel-associated targets. It’s not a stretch for many people to consider a synagogue with a JNF billboard outside, or a demonstration like Toronto’s 50,000-strong (roughly 1/4 of Toronto’s Jews) Walk For Israel as Israel-associated enough. To your Ukraine example, if people were using a phrase in Ukrainian solidarity protests that left open for interpretation that Russian-Canadian or Russian-American people or political and cultural institutions, were legitimate targets for violence, I think there would also be significant concern.I don’t think that “globalize the intifada” should be banned, and I think that people saying it contributes a vanishingly small fraction of the added risk to Jews compared to the now innumerable and extensively documented Israeli war crimes paired with overwhelming diaspora Jewish institutional support for their necessity. The phrase is the voice of the rage, not its source! But I wonder how the movement could do better to be more surgical in its approach. A phrase that opens it up to culpability for those who take violence into their own hands provides easy ammunition for the well-organized forces of censure and suppression.A Holiday GiveawayOver the years I’ve had some requests to make certain interviews to be free and shareable for all in their entirety. So, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove as there have already been many requests for that one. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by just tapping like on that comment.)See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:There’s been a lot of discussion recently about CBS News, which is now under the control of Bari Weiss, and in particular about this segment that was done by 60 Minutes, which is the kind of flagship CBS News program about people who were deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador—Venezuelans who were deported and then who were treated really, really terribly there. And that this was all ready to go, this segment, and Bari Weiss stepped in, and, reportedly, she said that they shouldn’t air it unless they had an interview with Stephen Miller.And it produced a big furor, I think in part because it’s one of a number of series of things that have happened since this guy, David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance became the owner of CBS, and then brought in Bari Weiss as head of CBS News, which suggests that—although CBS isn’t full-on Fox, in the sense that it’s just doing pure propaganda sycophancy for Trump—it is really trying not to offend the Trump administration in various different ways. In fact, it has been reported that Trump has privately said that he believed David Ellison and his father, Larry Ellison, would make CBS more sympathetic to him, and that he thought under Bari Weiss, that CBS would be more sympathetic. CBS announced after the Homeland Secretary, Kristi Noem, complained that they would now not kind of cut interviews with administration officials, but air them in full.And this is also part of a larger dynamic we’ve seen among Bari Weiss, even before she took over CBS News, when she was still just running The Free Press, this outlet she created, of kind of moving into someone who’s kind of, I would say, having a cozier relationship with the Trump administration and the people around Trump. So, for instance, The Free Press actually co-hosted an inauguration party for Trump’s second inaugural that was co-hosted with Elon Musk’s X.And there is, on its face, something really deeply ironic about this, right? You have Bari Weiss running CBS News as CBS News is becoming kind of part of this authoritarian oligarchy that Donald Trump is trying to create, of kind of sympathetic oligarchs who will control media enterprises in ways that will basically to a large degree, do his bidding. And Bari Weiss seems to be playing a role in that.And yet, Bari Weiss, in an earlier part of her career, kind of really made her name as someone who spoke out very, very forcibly about free speech, and about not being cowed, journalists not being cowed from taking unpopular opinions. She kind of famously, or infamously, depending on how you looked at it, kind of resigned from the New York Times. And when she left the New York Times, she wrote that it was no longer upholding ‘the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society’; that ‘self-censorship has become the norm’; and that ‘stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences.’And so, now you have this very ironic situation, right, where CBS News seems to be really choosing stories to satisfy the most narrow—and most dangerously narrow—of audiences in an authoritarian president, right, to make him not upset because the Ellison family still has these business interests that they want Donald Trump to be taking care of.It seems to me that one way of understanding what’s happened over the arc of Bari Weiss’s career is that Bari Weiss always made an exception on the question of free speech for the question of Palestinian rights. She was really a kind of almost a paradigmatic case of what people would call the kind of Palestine exception, of people who speak very, very vocally about the need to have a wide range of opinions, to not be cowed by powerful interests when it comes to voicing controversial views, but—when it comes to Palestinian rights—take a very, very different view.And, it seems to me, the lesson that we’ve seen, that we can trace with the arc of Bari Weiss’s career is that this Palestine exception doesn’t remain with Palestine. That when you make that exception to the principles, to beliefs about free speech and censorship, ultimately what you end up doing is becoming actually a supporter of a much broader form of censorship and an assault on free speech. And I think we can see that in the arc of Bari Weiss’s career.So, Bari Weiss, when Bari Weiss was literally just a student, she was involved in this effort that was funded by this pro-Israel group called the David Project to essentially try to get pro-Palestinian professors disciplined or fired. So, it was a kind of early indication of the kind of much larger assault on pro-Palestinian speech on campus that we’ve now seen in such dramatic ways in the last couple of years. And Bari Weiss was literally, and her efforts were denounced by the American Civil Liberties Union as a threat to free speech.And it seems to me that one of the legacies of this, if you look at her career, is that her whole way of thinking about what threatens free speech has been very influenced by this experience of making an exception for Israel, which is that Bari Weiss has very generally tended to describe threats to free speech as coming from below and not from above. That her career has been involved in suggesting that the threats from free speech come not from powerful corporations and government, but from the kind of the woke mob, right?And I think that’s partly her orientation, is that way because, in fact, the places that you find the most pro-Palestinian sentiment have been coming from below, right, from activist organizations on university campuses in general. And you have more support from Israel in kind of positions of greater power in American society. So, Weiss’s entire, I think, orientation around the question of free speech, which is to be much more concerned about the way in which free speech is menaced by campus activists or people who are beholden to woke ‘mobs’ rather than being concerned about the way free speech is menaced by the government or by large corporations, is precisely because, actually, she has such a blind spot on the question of Palestinian free speech that she’s been

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guests this week are two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. They talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West BankA way to directly help victims of the massacre in SydneyThis week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. Both are now active in Smol Emuni, the religious left. They’ll talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.Cited in Today’s VideoThe premier of New South Wales calls for banning “globalize the intifada.”Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.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!), Samuel Stein reports on Zohran Mamdani’s looming struggle with the real estate industry.Gaza no longer faces famine. But its people are still hungry.Israel is preparing for a permanent presence in Gaza.On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.A Holiday GiveawayWe’ve had many requests to open up certain interviews, so they are free and shareable for all. So, this holiday season, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by liking that comment.) If this goes well we’ll make it an annual tradition.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So now, a week or so after the terrible massacre in Sydney, Australia, the Australian government is considering doing some sensible things, like limiting the number of guns that any person in Australia can own, but also considering doing some things that would be really fundamental violations of people’s rights to free speech. Among them, the Premier of New South Wales, the Australian state that encompasses Sydney, said that he wants to ban the phrase “globalize the intifada.”Now, this is really stupid and dangerous at a number of levels. First of all, does anyone really think that banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would have stopped this father and son, who were evidently connected to ISIS, from having committed this terrible attack? If these people had an ISIS ideology, banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would do absolutely nothing to prevent them from committing this heinous terrorist attack. On its face, it’s just ridiculous to think that banning this phrase would have done anything to prevent the terrible violence that occurred. But beyond that, it’s simply a grave violation of people’s basic, fundamental rights to say that you can’t use the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Intifada is an Arabic word that means uprising. It doesn’t mean uprising against Israel or Jews. It means uprising in general. The Arab Spring was often referred to as an intifada. An intifada, like any uprising, or any revolutionary political movement, can be violent or nonviolent. The first Palestinian intifada, in the late 1980s, was largely nonviolent. The second one, in the early 2000s, was much more violent. It can be violent or non-violent.So, yes, “globalize the intifada” could be interpreted as a call for violence. It could also be interpreted as a call for an uprising that’s not violent. But even if “globalize the intifada” is interpreted, or meant by the speaker, as a call for violence, we allow people to call for violence on the streets all the time. Threatening violence against one individual person is one thing, but saying you support violence in general in some kind of political context is not at all. If people protest in defense of Ukraine’s right to fight against Russia, and protest for their government to give arms to Ukraine. They’re protesting in support of Ukrainians using violence in that cause.The fact that it’s a call for violence doesn’t mean that it should be banned. Similarly, if someone goes out in a protest and says Israel has the right to defend itself; I stand with the IDF. In the wake of what Israel’s been doing in Gaza, those are endorsements of violence. People have the right to say those things. People have the right to participate in political speech, and in political speech around a whole range of different things. People often endorse violence of various forms that they believe will serve their political ends. Sometimes those calls for violence are odious, sometimes those calls for violence, as—let’s say in the case of Ukraine—might be ones that are widely supported. But the point is that people have the right to make that kind of political speech.You know, I still remember when it was conservatives—including many Jewish conservatives— who would say, in response to what they felt like were the excesses of the ‘woke left’ who were trying to restrict speech on college campuses that would say again and again that speech is not violence. And that’s actually true. At least, speech that endorses violence in a broad sense, right? Again, I’m not talking about violence directed at a particular individual in a particular moment, but people who endorse the idea of violence in some broader sense, that speech is not in and of itself violence, right? If you say, I supported the Iraq War, right, that was a call for violence. It was not violence in and of itself. And this distinction is completely being collapsed in this case. Again, this is even if you assume the harshest interpretation of the phrase, which is that it is a call for violence, which some people who will use that phrase would strongly contest.I think a lot of this reminds me of this now-famous book that Naomi Klein wrote called The Shock Doctrine, in which in the wake of a shock, in which people are traumatized and angry and afraid, you take advantage of that to push through things that you’ve been wanting to push through for ages, but you now have the political opportunity to do so in a time when reason often goes out the window, and you can appeal to people’s emotions and fears.We saw this, of course, in the United States after September 11th with the passage of the Patriot Act. To a different degree, we saw this after October 7th in the United States, with a massive crackdown on free speech, of rights of people to protest on university campuses and elsewhere, that I think historians will look back—as they do in the post-911 era—as a period of very serious infractions of people’s rights to free speech, the firing of professors, the deportation of students on foreign visas because they had made politically controversial statements.All of this stuff is now what is being attempted to be reenacted in Australia by Australian politicians and by pro-Israel organizations. None of this will do anything to make Australian Jews safer. What it will do is exactly what it did in the United States after September 11th, what it did in the 1950s in the hysteria and the wake in the McCarthy era during the Korean War, and what it has done since October 7th. It will do in Australia what it has done in America, which is not to make anyone safer, but to make the country less free.And when you start to violate people’s basic rights to free speech for one political purpose, you open the door to people to start doing that in many, many arenas. So, if you can ban the phrase “globalize the intifada” because people find that phrase threatening, and they say that speech that could support violence is in itself violence, you are opening the door to lots and lots of other people going around and trying to restrict your speech on the same grounds.And that’s the way in which countries become less free. That is what has happened in the United States over the last 25 years, and I think Australians should think long and hard about whether they want to go down our path now in the wake of this terrible massacre in Sydney. 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.comSarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice.

This week’s zoom call will be at A SPECIAL TIME: THURSDAY AT 2 PM Eastern. In light of the Chanukah massacre in Sydney, we’ll talk to Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, and is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice. We’ll talk about the unique history of the Jewish community in Australia, about the rise of antisemitism there and about how to combat it while also opposing bigotry against all people.Cited in Today’s VideoThe Babylonian Talmud’s discussion of the dangers of lighting a Chanukiah in public.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!), Anne Irfan shows how the Trump plan for Gaza is crowding Palestinians there into even less land.Dana El Kurd talks to Matan Kaminer and Ben Schuman-Stoler about Gaza and the Abraham Accords.A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.See you on Thursday at 2,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:When I woke up on Sunday morning and read the news of this terrible massacre on the first night of Chanukah in Sydney, Australia, a couple of things went through my mind.The first is about the nature of Jews in Australia, and the second is about the nature of Chanukah. I’ve had the good fortune of spending a fair amount of time in the Jewish community in Sydney and Melbourne, and the Australian Jewish community is one of the most extraordinary that I have ever seen anywhere in the world. It’s a very, very cohesive Jewish community; very, very vibrant; very strong dedication to Jewish education. And it’s different than the American Jewish community in that it is closer to the European experience. Most American Jews came to the U.S. in the late 19th or early 20th century. Many Australian Jews came later, before or after the Holocaust. And so, you have a much larger percentage of families in Australia that are the direct descendants of people who survived the Holocaust, with many, many families being touched very, very deeply by that experience. It is really a community that is more, I think, affected, more closer to, more traumatized by the experience of the Holocaust than almost any other Jewish community on Earth. And so, for a community that has that deep trauma in so many Australian Jewish families, to now have this new trauma, this terrible, terrible massacre that killed—we now know—15 people on the first night of Chanukah is just horrifying beyond words.The second thing is about the fact that it happened on Chanukah. When I read the news, I was reminded that there’s not a lot of discussion about Chanukah in the Talmud, but in the relatively brief discussion there is, there’s a discussion in Tractate Shabbat about the nature, about the mitzvah to put the Chanukiah—the Chanukah lamp—in the entrance to one’s house.And the rabbis say that the mitzvah, the obligation, is to put the Chanukiah, the lamp, in the window, so it is visible to the public. But then, they say that the sages say that in a time of danger, in a time of religious persecution, when Jews are not allowed to perform the mitzvah of lighting the Chanukah lamp, it is permitted to place the Chanukiah on the table instead, so it can’t be seen from outside.And so, it was very, very poignant to think about this discussion in the Babylonian Talmud against the backdrop of this experience in Sydney, Australia, which did turn out to be extremely dangerous—deadly, actually—to perform the mitzvah of publicizing the miracle of Chanukah, and that the rabbis, you know, the rabbis close to 2,000 years ago, were worried about this very issue. Could Jews safely celebrate Chanukah, publicize the mitzvah of Chanukah, or did we need a special dispensation to say that in times of grave danger, that Jews can perform the Chanukah ritual, the celebration, in private?And so, to me, that seems to me, in some ways, kind of one way of thinking about what is at stake today, in a world of rising antisemitism. Do we live in a world in which it is safe for Jews to light Chanukiahs in public, as the rabbis prefer to publicize the miracle that happened, that we celebrate on Chanukah, or do we live in a time of such great danger that Jews should have to do so in private because the risk of doing what those Australian Jews did on the first night on Bondi Beach in Sydney is actually too dangerous?I am sure, I am sure, that the response by Jewish communities around the world will be to double down on the obligation to publicize the miracle, perform the celebration of Chanukah in public, to not be daunted, to not be scared by this. But it is terrible. It is terrible to imagine that there might be some who actually now need to go back to the Talmudic discussion, about whether it’s safe, in fact, to light a Chanukiah, given now that we’ve seen this terrible, terrible massacre in Sydney. It just shows that we still live in a world that is dangerous for Jews, and that some of the ancient, ancient discussions about how to keep Jews safe are still relevant today, and that some of the terrible, terrible horrors that many Australian Jews faced, the antisemitism in their families in Europe, that in a different way, that antisemitism has returned in Australia, and on Chanukah of all holidays. 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.comMahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, and father of the mayor-elect of New York City. We’ll talk about Professor Mamdani’s new memoir about his family’s experience in Uganda, his research on the similarities—and differences—between settler-colonialism in South Africa, Israel-Palestine and the United States, and what it’s like to be a Muslim in Trump’s America.

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Given the controversy over my talk at Tel Aviv University, I thought it would be interesting to talk to two experts on boycotts. Zackie Achmat is a veteran South African political activist and a leading authority on the role of boycotts in the anti-apartheid movement. Mazin Qumsiyeh is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University and the author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, which chronicles non-violent protest in Palestinian history. We spoke about the history of boycotts in both places, the ethical dilemmas they create, and whether or not they work. 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