This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be Aslı Bâli, professor international law at Yale, and Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. When I imagine the people I’d want to advise the next Democratic president, Asli and Trita are near the top of my list. They care deeply about the United States but they’re not American exceptionalists, which helps them see past the mythology that prevents so many in Washington from understanding American foreign policy’s actual impact on the rest of the world. In a perfect illustration of the insanity of contemporary Washington, Trita— whose predictions about this criminal and catastrophic war have been proven entirely correct—is being threatened with deportation. We’ll talk about why this war happened, how it has changed the Middle East and world, and whether Washington will ever learn. Please join us.
Ask Me Anything
This Thursday, June 25, at 4 PM Eastern, we will hold an Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
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!), Zachary Jablow writes about why the US media still pretends that America’s Mideast wars are about democracy.
The Jewish candidate for New York City comptroller who wants to divest from Israel bonds.
On the Spiritually Incorrect podcast, I talked about American Christians, American Jews and the US debate over Israel.
See you onThursday andFriday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I’ve done a couple conversations recently with folks who argued that if there were equality under the law in Israel-Palestine—if Jews and Palestinians, were treated equally under the law wherever they lived, whether that was in one state or in two states where Jews and Palestinians both lived and were treated equally under the law, or in a confederation, you know, something in between—that liberal democracy would fail, that there would be some kind of dictatorship or authoritarianism, and also that there would be tremendous, tremendous violence, terrible bloodshed. This was really their primary rejoinder to my argument that, equality under the law would better serve the people who live in Israel-Palestine today than the system where you have now, where Jews enjoy legal rights, and Palestinians either hold no citizenship or a kind of second-class citizenship.
And I think it’s just worth pausing on this argument that equality under the law would produce a dictatorship, you know, authoritarianism, and also tremendous bloodshed. What I find odd about the argument is that it’s imagining terrible things in the future that could happen if a true liberal democracy failed, without acknowledging that those same terrible things that folks are warning about exist now.
It’s odd to say that an Israel-Palestine that treated everybody equally under the law might not succeed as a liberal democracy, without acknowledging that Israel is not a liberal democracy for Palestinians today. Most of the Palestinians who live under Israeli control, those in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, don’t hold Israeli citizenship—a very small number in East Jerusalem, but generally, vast majority in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem live under the control of the State of Israel. It has life and death power over them, but they can’t be citizens of the state in which they live. They can’t vote for the government that has life and death decision-making power over them. In the West Bank, they live under military law, under a completely different legal system than their Jewish neighbors, right?
So, this is not by anyone’s definition, I think, could be considered a liberal democracy. This is the situation in which most Palestinians live. A minority of Palestinians, so-called Arab-Israelis, have a kind of second-class citizenship where they can vote, but the structure of the state is designed to prioritize, in many, many, many ways, prioritize the needs of Israeli Jews over them, right?
But when people say that liberal democracy might not succeed, they seem to be ignoring the fact that Israel is not a liberal democracy for Palestinians now. And then when they say, well, this situation, a situation in which people were treated equally under the law, might be tremendously violent, I wonder, are they paying attention to how violent the current situation is?
Israel has killed maybe 100,000 Palestinians, based on the best estimates we have in Gaza alone, right? That’s maybe roughly, you know, 5% of the population not even counting the injured. And the killing continues. Israel’s continuing to kill Palestinians despite this ceasefire, not to mention the many who are dying because there’s been no rebuilding of the medical infrastructure because there’s no sewage system, right? This is a recipe for continued death in Gaza on a pretty significant scale. And in the West Bank, you have attacks and killings of Palestinians virtually constantly, right?
So, when you say Israel-Palestine might succumb, might be a very, very violent place, you have to measure that against how extraordinarily violent it is for Palestinians today. And I think part of this move of saying Israel-Palestine might be very dangerous, might be very violent, is that it actually simply kind of ignores what the reality is for Palestinians today, and in a way, suggests that the only real question that we should be concerned about is, would it be more or less dangerous for Israeli Jews?
But even there Israel is a very dangerous place for Israeli Jews, too. Not nearly as dangerous as for Palestinians, but when you compare it to the life situations of Jews in virtually every other large Jewish community in the world, living as an Israeli Jew is much more dangerous. Twelve hundred Israeli Jews were killed on October 7th. Israelis have continued to die and be wounded in the wars in Israel’s assault on Gaza, in fighting against Hezbollah.
So, again, when one says this could be a dangerous place, one has to ask, compared to what Israel is currently an extraordinarily dangerous place for Palestinians. Really, probably being a Palestinian under Israeli control is one of the most dangerous situations you could possibly be in in the world, certainly in Gaza, and even in the West Bank, and even for Jews, despite their legal supremacy and their relative safety, this situation of domination and oppression, structural violence against Palestinians, produces this counter-violence, and also creates incentives for other groups, whether, like, Hezbollah or Iran, to come in on the Palestinian side, and also use violence against Israeli Jews. Which means that Israeli Jews are going into bomb shelters, right, all the time in a way that Jews in the United States, in France, in Australia, in Britain, in Canada, no matter what you think of the dangers of antisemitism, those places are simply not doing at all, right?
So, it just seems to me, if we’re going to have an honest conversation about the potential perils of trying to move towards equality under the law in Israel-Palestine, which is a very, very frightening prospect for many, many Jews—I think much less frightening prospect for Palestinians, but a frightening prospect for Israeli Jews—we have to compare that against the baseline of how authoritarian and how extraordinarily violent Israel-Palestine is today.
And unless you’re facing that squarely, it seems to me, you can’t have a productive conversation about the potential risks and the potential opportunities in trying to move from a situation that is now classified as apartheid by the world’s leading human rights organizations towards a legal reality in which people are treated equally under the law, regardless of whether they’re Palestinian or Jewish.
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