This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Darializa Avila Chevalier, who last month won the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York’s 13th district. Avila Chevalier has attracted controversy for her views on Israel-Palestine, among other issues. But the interviews with her that I’ve seen haven’t probed those views in depth. I want to ask what she saw while living in the West Bank and as an activist at Columbia University’s Gaza encampment. I want to better understand her views about October 7, about Zionism and Zionists, and about what she believes would constitute a just future in Israel-Palestine. This conversation will be 45 minutes long, not the usual one hour. Please join us.
I’ll also be recording a conversation this week with California State Senator and congressional candidate Scott Wiener about the harassment he recently experienced at San Francisco’s Trans march, and about his views about Gaza and US policy towards Israel-Palestine. That conversation won’t include a live audience, but subscribers will receive it in the coming days.
Cited in Today’s Video
Bryan Stevenson’s conversation with Ezra Klein.
Donald Trump says the Smithsonian museums focus too much on slavery.
Israel’s law penalizing municipalities that acknowledge the Nakba.
Israel’s defense minister says his government wants Palestinians to leave 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!), I argued that Zohran Mamdani’s influence could help Democrats win back the presidency.
In the London Review of Books, Muhammad Shehada wrote about Marwan Barghouti and the Palestinian future.
In Politico, Steve Bannon says a democratic socialist could win the White House.
On July 9, I’ll be speaking in New York to the Halachic Left, a group of anti-occupation observant Jews.
On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.
See you onFriday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
There’s been a ton of political commentary recently about the 250th anniversary of the United States, which was celebrated this weekend. And one of the things that I found most powerful was a conversation that Ezra Klein did for the New York Times with Bryan Stevenson. And Bryan Stevenson leads something called the Equal Justice Initiative. It’s an initiative that defends Black Americans and others who are discriminated against in the criminal justice system. And also, Stevenson created this extraordinary monument and memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, that, among other things, lists the names of 4,000 Black Americans who were lynched in the United States.
And Stevenson said something to Klein that really struck me. Stevenson said that he went to Holocaust museums, and that by the end of a Holocaust museum, the moral imperative is very clear: never again. But Stevenson said that there wasn’t the equivalent in the United States of these kind of museums that had the clear moral imperative—never again—which is why he created this monument and museum in Montgomery.
And I think he’s right, you know, it’s quite astonishing when you just step back and realize that there is no monument on the National Mall in Washington, DC to either slavery or to the genocide of Native Americans. It is true there are these museums, fairly recently constructed, one for the American Indian and one for African American history and culture. But even those are now under attack in the Trump administration for, as Trump said in the fall of 2025, for focusing too much on slavery.
So, even the very kind of modest degree of memorialization that we have—which is nothing like what you see in Germany and in other countries where the Holocaust was perpetrated—was considered too much for the current President of the United States. And I think there is a direct line between this refusal to look America’s history in the face, America’s history of genocide and white supremacy, and the fact that we now have this blatantly white supremacist politics that’s returned.
And you can see something similar in Jewish discourse as well. Which is to say, if America has not had its kind of never-again moment, if the United States doesn’t have a public culture that asks people to say never again as it regards white supremacy and the genocide of Native Americans, that Israel and the broader Jewish world doesn’t have that never-again culture as well.
That might sound very strange, of course, because Jews, most of us are raised to always think in terms of never again, as it relates to the Nazi Holocaust. So, we are accustomed to thinking, when we are the victims, of thinking about the importance of this idea of never again. But to even to suggest that Israeli Jews and Jews around the rest of the world might need to start having a public culture of saying never again about the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is in and of itself an extremely subversive and provocative claim.
In fact, though, it is precisely the unwillingness to have this public expression of never again, that just as in the United States, makes the continuing expulsion of Palestinians possible. So, there’s a direct line between the fact that Israel literally penalizes municipalities that commemorate the Nakba of 1948, and the fact that Israel’s stated policy today in Gaza, as recently expressed by Israel’s defense minister, is ‘voluntary migration of Palestinians.’ You know, voluntary, right? I mean, you, you make the place catastrophically unlivable. You prevent any rebuilding that might allow people to have anything resembling a decent life in Gaza. And then you say, you know, our policy is that we think you’d be better off somewhere else, and we’re really willing to help facilitate you. You know, we’ll buy you a plane ride, a plane trip to Somaliland or Rwanda or something, and get you out of here.
I think Stevenson’s point is this is the consequence of not having a culture of never again. In the United States, the consequence of not having this culture of never again is Donald Trump. In Israel and in the Jewish world, the consequence of not having a culture of never again, of the fact that whole entire generation after generation of Israeli Jews—but also American Jews, Jews in other parts of the world—grow up within institutions, synagogues, Jewish schools, camps, youth movements, et cetera, where there is no honest reckoning with the Nakba. There’s a direct line between that refusal to say never again when it comes to what a Jewish state did to Palestinians, and the fact that the Jewish state is continuing to do exactly that, to continue this process of mass expulsion.
And if we’re ever going to have a fundamental change, both in the United States and in Israel, and more broadly in the Jewish world, it starts with looking hard in the eye these historical crimes and committing to then not allowing them to happen again. I think that the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States is a good moment to remember that.
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
