After relying on an unreliable Trump for defense, suspending normalization talks with Israel, and losing access to the Bab-al-Mandab Strait, Saudi Arabia turns to hesitant allies for help.
After relying on an unreliable Trump for defense, suspending normalization talks with Israel, and losing access to the Bab-al-Mandab Strait, Saudi Arabia turns to hesitant allies for help.
Families and spouses in Gaza are still waiting to be reunited with their loved ones after the Israeli army suspended travel in and out of the Strip.
Please join us.
Ask Me Anything
This Wednesday, September 30, at 2 PM Eastern, we will hold an Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
Cited in this Week’s Video
My New York Times essay on the Democrats’ policy toward Palestinians.
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 reports on the yeshiva day school protest against Zohran Mamdani.
For the New York Times, I reviewed Akbar Ahmed’s book, Crossing the Red Line, about the Biden administration’s policy toward Gaza.
Register for Jewish Currents Live on October 11.
I’ll see you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I wrote an essay last week in the New York Times that I wanted to elaborate on a little bit. The essay argues that Democrats have fundamentally—or are in the midst of fundamentally—rethinking their policy towards Israel, opposing military aid and being willing even to put meaningful restrictions on arms sales to Israel.
But Democrats have not rethought their policy towards the Palestinians. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that it’s not enough simply to end Israel’s impunity for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, and to try to end American complicity. Palestinians also have to have the… need to have the ability to choose legitimate leaders who can offer a vision for a world beyond Israeli oppression of Palestinians, a vision of freedom. And Palestinians had not been allowed to do that. The last time Palestinians held elections in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem was in 2006 for the Palestinian parliament. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, had been elected separately.
The Bush administration had pushed for those elections. It was in this brief moment of kind of supporting, supposedly, Middle Eastern democracy. But then when Hamas won the parliamentary elections, which wasn’t really surprising, because Mahmoud Abbas was widely already then considered to be corrupt and authoritarian. That when Hamas won a plurality of the votes and majority of the seats in the Palestinian parliament, the Bush administration turned around and pressured Abbas, essentially, to rule without parliament, to rule as a dictator, which he’s been happy to do now for the last 20 years. He’s also destroyed the independent Palestinian judiciary, so there are no checks and balances on his authority in the West Bank, nor have there been on Hamas’ in Gaza. Hamas has also not had to answer to the Palestinian people for the last 20 years.
And the truth of the matter is that Israel has been happy about that, because it keeps the Palestinians divided, right? Because on elections could choose a leadership that could encompass both the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and also because it means that in the West Bank, they have in Mahmoud Abbas, essentially a subcontractor. I mean, Israeli leaders yell about Abbas, but in fact, they’d much prefer Abbas to the alternative because Abbas works with them to keep the West Bank quiet, to prevent Palestinians rising up against their oppression. And he can only do that because he is authoritarian.
It’s very unlikely a democratically elected Palestinian leadership would be able to work hand-in-glove with the Israeli military to maintain Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Imagine, again, imagine, you think, legitimate nationalist liberation movements don’t do that kind of thing. You think the African National Congress in South Africa would have worked hand-in-glove with the South African military to basically maintain its repression of Black South Africans, or that the IRA would have done that in Northern Ireland? Of course not, right?
So, this authoritarianism, which also facilitates Mahmoud Abbas’ corruption, because you can’t boot him out of office because you’re not holding elections, this actually serves Israel, and it also has served the United States, which also really has wanted to keep things quiet in the West Bank, even if that means Palestinians going without basic rights. In fact, I think one of the worst things the Biden administration did when it came to Israel and Palestine was basically give both Israel and Abbas a kind of green light to cancel elections that were supposed to be held back in 2021.
So, it’s really important that Democrats repudiate that and say that Palestinians should be able to hold elections now. And one of the reasons it’s so important for Palestinians to be able to hold elections and choose a legitimate leadership is the Palestinian solidarity movement has accomplished remarkable things, despite, like, tremendous repression, but one fundamental weakness it has compared to, let’s say, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, is that during the anti-apartheid movement, all of these activists around the world who wanted to support Black South Africans in getting their freedom, they could look to a legitimate Black South African political leadership—it wasn’t only black, it was actually multiracial—the African National Congress, which had a vision of the South Africa it wanted, and could also make decisions about tactics and strategy.
Pro-Palestinian activists today have no such Palestinian leadership they can look to, to say, this is the vision of freedom that we’re going to rally behind, and to help think through sometimes difficult tactical and strategic decisions involving things like, for instance, boycott, divestment, sanctions, normalization, all of these things, right? And so, this is why a legitimate Palestine leadership is so important.
But you can’t have a legitimate Palestinian leadership, and you can’t have legitimate elections unless the Palestinian politicians and parties that have the most support are allowed to run. The most popular Palestinian politician, according to all the polls that I’ve seen, is Marwan Barghouti. He’s actually a member of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, so he’s not a member of Hamas. He’s not an Islamist. But unlike Abbas, he’s not been considered to be corrupt and a kind of collaborator. He’s actually considered a man of great integrity. He’s been in jail for decades and decades.
So, you have to allow Barghouti. Barghouti, according to the polls, would easily defeat Abbas and easily defeat the leaders of Hamas. You can’t have a legitimate election if this man still sits in prison. Similarly, you can’t have a legitimate election if Hamas is not allowed to run. Hamas, although less popular than Barghouti by far, is still one of the two main Palestinian parties, and it also needs to be allowed to run.
The report suggests that Hamas might not actually run on its own. It actually might, interestingly, scramble things by running with some other dissidents from Fatah in a kind of a joint slate, but the United States and Israel can’t tell Palestinians who can run in their elections if those elections are going to be legitimate.
Now, of course, people will say, Hamas has blood on its hands. Yes, Hamas has blood on its hands. There’s no question about that. Hamas purposely targeted civilians on October 7th. It did that during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. It did that during the 1990s. These were war crimes.
Marwan Barghouti is in jail because he was convicted by an Israeli court of being involved in overseeing murders of Israelis during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. The reality there is harder to figure out because the court decision was widely criticized by international observers. It was not really a free and fair judicial decision, and Barghouti has said that he opposes attacks on civilians. But there’s no question that there was a significant amount of violence against Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada, and that Barghouti was part of that military response by Palestinians in the early 2000s.
But Israeli politicians who are running in elections also have blood on their hands. Actually, Benjamin Netanyahu has far more blood on his hands. If you just look at the number of Palestinians that have been killed under his watch, and particularly since October 7th, the man has, after all, been indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, and no one is saying he should not be allowed to run in Israeli elections. Almost nobody’s even saying that Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who essentially want to expel the entire Palestinian people, that they should not be allowed to run, right?
We’ve so long in the United States had this completely double standard when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians. And I think this needs to end. There should be one common standard, which is to say, Palestinians should be able to choose their leaders even if they may have the right to vote for leaders who we find reprehensible. Similarly, Israelis have the right to choose their leaders even if some of those potential leaders have done things that are reprehensible.
The U.S. position should be—the Democratic Party’s position should be—we’re not going to tell you who you can vote for. What we are going to say is that any Israeli, any Israeli leader, any Israeli individual, any Palestinian leader, any Palestinian individual, any Israeli party, any Palestinian party that commits war crimes, that violates international law will be sanctioned by the United States, and that is one universal standard for both Israelis and Palestinians because Palestinian life and Israeli life is equally precious. That should be the standard that the U.S. applies to the question of whether Hamas can run an election and whether Netanyahu can run in an election.
It’s also important that Hamas be allowed to join the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which historically was the umbrella for all the Palestinian factions, and allowed them to offer kind of a joint vision, of what they wanted. And that can represent not only Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, but Palestinian refugees, Palestinians more generally.
The irony, by the way, of Barghouti potentially winning is that Barghouti’s position, as far as we know, is actually in support of two states. He’s spoken, according to his son, as recently as this year, saying that he wants coexistence between a free Palestinian and a free Israeli state, which actually makes him, in some ways, you know, in American left or pro-Palestine circles, kind of comparatively immoderate. It just shows we really don’t know when Palestinians are allowed to have a legitimate process, how their politics will turn out. That’s what democracy allows.
Historically, the PLO, the Palestinian National Movement, called for a secular, democratic Palestine. In 1988, the PLO shifted and embraced the idea of partition along the 1967 lines but that decision doesn’t have any legitimacy anymore because it doesn’t have a legitimate leadership that’s upholding it. You have to have a legitimate Palestinian leadership that can either renew its support for partition between two states, or support the idea of one equal state.
Now, if the PLO decides that it still supports the idea of two states, and Palestinians do through elections, that would be actually different than the view that I’ve articulated, which is for kind of one equal state, or at least a kind of confederation, in which people live in an integrated unit. But the point is that it’s not for me to make those decisions, right? It’s for Palestinians to make those decisions and to articulate a vision.
And then, once you have a unified, legitimate Palestinian leadership articulating a vision, they can then sit down with Israeli leaders—Israeli leaders who, because they no longer have an unconditional weapons flow from the United States, because they no longer have impunity, will hopefully one day realize they can’t solve their problem with the Palestinians by simply trying to kill them and expel them. That they actually have to deal with Palestinians as human beings who have legitimate grievances, legitimate desires for freedom and justice. And then under those conditions, I think you can actually have a peace process, right, that actually can get somewhere. But it requires having Palestinians who are allowed to speak for themselves.
In so many ways, the United States has prevented Palestinians from being able to speak on their behalf. And that’s one of the fundamental things that needs to change in the Democratic Party. Every Democratic presidential candidate should be asked to say whether he or she believes that Marwan Barghouti should be allowed to be freed from jail, and Palestinians should be allowed to choose their own legitimate leaders.
This should be as important, I think, a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates going towards 2028 as whether they support they support ending U.S. military aid and ending U.S. arms sales to help Israel commit war crimes. This would be a really important shift inside the Democratic Party over the next couple of years.
]]>We discuss:
Israel’s attempt to ban Palestinian candidates in the upcoming election
The absence of a true left in Israel
The attempt to bring West Bank apartheid to all of Israel
How NAZA finally broke through the Israeli bubble
Living post-10/7 as a Palestinian citizen of Israel
Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, the so-called paper of record has begun to update its language on Israel, reflecting a larger shift in US public opinion.
Women in Gaza who lost their husbands in the genocide are caught between the need to work and the pain of leaving their children alone, susceptible to Israeli violence. According to the UN, these women now represent 1 in 4 households in Gaza.
At the end of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unhinged rant at the UN, he recited a seemingly obscure Bible verse. But it’s actually a dog whistle for genocide.
In Masafer Yatta in the southern occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers are accelerating their attacks on Palestinian farmers and herders in the area by cutting off their water supply.
