Peter Beinart Seeks 'A Reckoning'

Title: Peter Beinart Seeks 'A Reckoning' [theme music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Peter Beinart is with us now. The New York Times contributing opinion writer, CUNY Newmark School of Journalism professor, MSNBC contributor, and editor at large at Jewish Currents magazine has a new book called Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza. Peter, welcome back to WNYC.

Peter Beinart: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Here are a few clips to set up the conversation. Here is UN Secretary-General António Guterres yesterday, Holocaust remembrance day on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres: One of the clearest and most troubling examples is the spreading cancer of Holocaust denial. Indisputable historical facts are being distorted, diminished, and dismissed and efforts are being made to recast and rehabilitate Nazis and their collaborators. We must stand up to these outrages.

Brian: UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Also yesterday, it was also a day that saw more Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners released in an exchange between Israel and Hamas as part of their ceasefire agreement and that saw Palestinians with homes in northern Gaza allowed to return for the first time since the start of the war. Here is NPR's producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, expressing some of his emotion as he himself was one of those people returning to Gaza City.

Anas Baba: Now I'm getting closer to the outskirts of Gaza City. I'm feeling that there is shiver all over my body, electricity that just gives me more energy to keep going, to keep walking. I'm sorry that my voice is truly thrilled but I'm extremely happy. I'm grateful.

Brian: NPR's producer in Gaza, Anas Baba. Here is President Trump, also in the last day, doubling down on his call for Egypt and Jordan to take in basically all the Palestinians who have been living in Gaza, a million and a half people or so he says in this clip. This was his first comment on it two days ago.

President Trump: I'd like Egypt to take people and I'd like Jordan to take people. I mean, you're talking about probably a million and a half people and we just clean out that whole thing.

Brian: President Trump. Peter, can we start with that Trump clip, start on a little news before we get to the book per se? Is this a call for ethnic cleansing, in your view, that goes even beyond what the Netanyahu government has called for or an extreme but humanitarian way to make Gaza livable again after it's been destroyed to such a degree in this war, and then people can return?

Peter: No, this is absolutely ethnic cleansing. It's monstrous. This would be one of the great crimes of our time. I hope to live long enough to hear that clip played at Donald Trump's court case in front of the International Criminal Court as a war criminal. Think about this. The people of Gaza, most of them are not from Gaza. They are the children, grandchildren of people who were expelled from what's now Israel in 1948, a population mostly of refugees.

Now, the territory of Gaza has been rendered completely unlivable, flattened. Most of the hospitals, schools, agriculture, buildings destroyed by American weapons. Donald Trump's answer is not that Gaza should be rebuilt, that people there should have basic freedom, or that they should be allowed to return to the homes from which their families were expelled in 1948 in Israel, but that they should be expelled to another country to be made refugees again, stateless, noncitizen refugees because now it's inconvenient because Gaza has been leveled but we helped to level it. This is just absolutely monstrous.

Brian: He did say it would be cleaned up and that it might be short term, that people would be refugees in Jordan or Egypt. Is there a scenario under which there's a benefit of the doubt there, in your opinion? Probably not given your first answer, but when they return and they don't have to rebuild in the rubble while they're trying to live in the rubble.

Peter: Israel has never allowed any Palestinian refugees to return, not those who were expelled en masse in 1948, not the hundreds of thousands more who were expelled in 1967. Israeli cabinet ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir and others have clearly talked about wanting to build Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. Why on earth would anyone believe that once Palestinians were sent into Egypt or Jordan, that they would ever be allowed to return?

Brian: On the ceasefire, Trump seemed to be pressuring Netanyahu and a lot of people's takes, not just Hamas, to accept the ceasefire deal that had been on the table under President Biden. Both sides did by his inauguration day deadline. How do you think at least this much agreement came about? Could it lead to the next phases that are, at least in theory, in that blueprint?

Peter: Thank God some of these hostages are returning and thank God there is some pause for people in Gaza to stop being bombed and to have more humanitarian aid so they at least are not starving to death. Trump did use American leverage in a way that Joe Biden didn't, which is a good thing. But I'm very pessimistic about the chances that this ceasefire will hold beyond the initial six-week period because Israel has never offered any vision for how Gaza will be governed beyond this war.

I think the most likely effect is that there is this prisoner and hostage exchange and there is a pause. But Hamas is still there, and remember, Israel said that the purpose of this war was to destroy Hamas. Does Hamas look destroyed to anyone? They're parading around the streets of Gaza. By Israel's own logic, it will have to continue this war.

Brian: Getting to your book, the very first words in the book are the dedication in memory of my grandmother, Adele Pienr. I hope I said her name right. And then you continue, "She disagreed with the arguments in this book and her spirit is on every page." Would you start to describe what you and your grandmother disagree on as a way of introducing your book?

Peter: My grandmother was a very formative person in my life, disagreed profoundly [chuckles] with my views about Israel for her entire life. She had a tumultuous life which began born in Egypt, then the Belgian Congo, then in South Africa. For her, the question of a Jewish state was utterly nonnegotiable. It was a source of security for her, given a particular experience that she had of a great deal of insecurity. I feel her presence with me always and especially her love and dedication and solidarity with our people, with the Jewish people, and her love of Jewish tradition. I always think about the time that I spent with Inshul with her.

But my views about Israel have changed because of decades of now spending time with Palestinians and seeing what Israel has meant to them, the way that the depth of the oppression that they have suffered. It has changed my belief about what is good for us. My belief is that Israeli Jews will be safer if Palestinians are free and if Palestinians are treated equally.

What my book tries to manifest, we'll see if it succeeds or not, is an argument about why we have gone wrong as an organized Jewish community, why Israel has gone wrong in very profound ways. But I try to make the argument in a way that even those who might disagree with me will see that this is coming from a position of love and solidarity for our people, the Jewish people.

Brian: On the clip that we played of UN Secretary-General Guterres yesterday on Holocaust Remembrance Day, your book seems to almost be based on an opposite premise, that many Americans and Israeli Jews alike are too identified with a narrative of historical persecution and victimhood, even this close to the Holocaust. Is that how you'd put it?

Peter: I would say we must always remember the horrors of the Holocaust and the longer-term horrors of Jewish history. But it's important to remember that the conditions that Jews live in in Israel and Palestine today are not the same as those that Jews lived in in Europe in the 20th century. The danger is you try to force the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into that framework or you essentially see Palestinians as the reincarnation of the Nazis or of the pogromists in the Russian Empire and you then I think fundamentally miss some really important truths.

The truth is that in Israel, Palestine, it's Jews who have legal supremacy. In Europe, Jews were legally inferior, but today it's Palestinians who are legally inferior, who live under Israeli control without citizenship in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, in military law in the West Bank, who don't have the right to vote for the government that wields life and death power over them. Unless one understands that, I don't think one can actually create a safer future for everybody.

Brian: You also argue a minority position in the book and your new column in The New York Times and people saw it, goes all the way there. The column in The Times is called 'states don't have a right to exist, people do.' Let's just acknowledge that you argue that Israeli Jews as well as Palestinians would be better off if Israel, correct me if I am over-interpreting it, abandoned its identity as a Jewish state and became a secular nonreligious democracy, correct?

Peter: Yes, I believe in the principle of equality under the law, that states should treat everyone equally under the law, irrespective of their religion, their race, their ethnicity. We are having to fight desperately for that principle now in the United States against some of the forces of Trumpism. I believe that principle is the right principle and it creates greater safety and peace for everybody. Because when you deny people their basic rights, you treat them as inferiors, as America did with Black people until Black people got the vote under the law. You subject them to tremendous amounts of violence and that violence ultimately endangers everybody.

What political science literature shows is that all people are safer when everyone has a voice in government. Most of the Palestinians under Israeli control cannot become citizens of the state under which they live. They can't vote. That's a system of violence that ultimately makes life less safe for everybody. The point that I was trying to make in my book is that Jewish tradition centers the dignity of the individual. That Abraham Joshua Heschel said it's the human being that is created in the image of God. Any state must be judged by how it treats the individual human being. A state is simply an instrument for the protection of Jewish life. It's not an end in and of itself.

Brian: This does put you in a tiny minority, I think it's fair to say, of American Jews and maybe of all people in the world. I don't think the progressive Jewish magazine where you're an editor, Jewish Currents, even makes that case. Unless they've changed their position recently since the ultimate solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so widely considered to be a two-state solution. Make your case in relation to that. Why go all the way to one state that's a general secular democracy? No more Israel as a Jewish state with a separate Palestinian state, when the rest of the world, that's not Netanyahu or Hamas, seems to be trying to lead toward a two-state solution.

Peter: It's funny that we consider this idea so radical and outlandish given that it's the principle that you and I believe in in the United States. It's the principle that was fought for in apartheid South Africa. It's the principle that structured the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, the principle that people should be treated equally according to the law.

I actually don't think it's the case that this view is as marginal among American Jews as you might suggest, especially among younger American Jews. Polling shows that a quite large percentage of young American Jews now consider Israel to be an apartheid state. In fact, there's a really interesting polling by Mira Sucharov, a Canadian political scientist who asked American Jews whether they consider themselves Zionists. If Zionism means that Jews have more rights than Palestinians. When phrased that way, most American Jews say no. There is a deep commitment in our community to the principle of equality under the law.

That's why when American Jews actually go and see what life is like for Palestinians and they learn more of the realities of what it means to live your entire life under a state where you don't have basic rights. Actually, you find that many, many people actually see the value of the idea of living equally. A two state solution might have, at one point, been an option, but the truth of the matter is that long time ago I think the possibility of partition ended. Israel is simply much too deeply entrenched in the West Bank at this point to create a sovereign, independent Palestinian state there.

Brian: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls in this segment. As Peter Beinat wrote, his grandmother disagreed with the arguments in this book but her spirit is on every page. We can take some calls in that spirit. Agree or disagree or dialogue on complexity if you see any, 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692.

Continuing to push, though, on that thread of two-state solution versus your proposed solution. The current ceasefire has as its next potential steps an expansion of the Abraham Accords, as you know, in which Saudi Arabia would join other Arab states that have recognized Israel, but under the condition that there would be a path to Palestinian statehood. Are you putting yourself out on an island when for almost everybody who has a stake in this, there is a process that has, as its goal, a two-state solution, difficult as that is acknowledging what you say about how much Israel is intertwined with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Peter: Brian, with all due respect, I think what you're talking about is an absolute fiction. There's no basis to it. It's total nonsense. The Israeli government is very, very explicitly, emphatically opposed to a Palestinian state and has been expanding settlement growth as much as possible in order to ensure that one is not possible. The Biden administration, I want to be clear, opposes a Palestinian state. It opposes a Palestinian state.

You might say no, they say they support a Palestinian state. But that's like me saying I support running the New York Marathon when I've never gone running and I sit on my couch and eat chocolate cake. The Biden administration's actions, which have been unconditional support for Israel, massive US military funding, even for an Israeli government that explicitly opposes a two-state solution and is moving to make one ever more impossible by subsidizing massive settlement growth, shows that in practice, the Biden administration does not support a Palestinian state.

This deal, if there is a deal with Saudi Arabia, it will not be a pathway to a state. It will have some meaningless fig-leaf language about some vague process. In reality, it will actually push Palestinians into even further away from freedom because their leverage that they had because Saudi Arabia hadn't made peace with Israel will be lost and indeed, Palestinians will be in an even weaker position in terms of gaining their basic rights.

Brian: Steve in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Peter Beinart, New York Times contributing opinion writer with a new op-ed, Jewish Currents editor at large, and now author of the book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza. Steve, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Steve: Hello. Thank you for taking my call. It's a lot of things to discuss over that. First of all, political science point of view. Russians claim that they want to occupy the West, to conquer the West by occupying the oil fields of the Middle East. Their tool is the Hamas. The PLO as the State Department funded, that they want to fight Israel because Israel is in their way to occupy the Middle East. The fight is not between Hamas and Israel. The fight is between Russia and the United States. Israel is trying to protect the Western interest, Hamas trying to protect the Russian interest.

Brian: That might have been a Cold War-era partial reality, but is that really relevant today?

Steve: Absolutely. They claim that this is their basic strategy of winning over the West, occupying the Middle East oil field. This is their strategy. The Hamas, when they come, the Hamas basic charter has two points which say that they have no other purpose than to destroy Israel. They have point 9 and point 11. They claim that that's their only purpose, to destroy Israel. Incidentally, Russians promised them self-expression. They would never have self-expression. Russians never gave self-expression to anyone. Neither they were eastern states nor their own people.

Brian: Steve, thank you very much for your call. To one of his points about Hamas continuing to want the destruction of Israel. Many Israelis would feel unsafe in the kind of state that you're proposing under the thought that it sounds good on paper to have a democratic secular state as opposed to a Jewish state, and possibly if it were to work out, a Palestinian state because there's so much hostility, there's so much antisemitism that groups like Hamas would still be out to kill Jews. As the population became majority Arab, which I think in the scenario that you're painting, it would, then Jews would be a persecuted minority just like they've been everywhere else for the last 2000 years.

Peter: Majority of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are actually Palestinians now. It's just that most of them don't have the right to vote. The question is, are you safer living alongside people who you oppress and deny and hold under what and maintain what your own human rights organizations have called an apartheid state or are you safer if those people can vote and have citizenship?

The question that I would ask is, why is it that Israeli Jews are so much less afraid of Palestinian citizens, what we call Arab Israelis, than they are of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? You know, many Israeli Jews are very frightened of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but every day they go to hospitals where they are treated by Palestinian citizens who are doctors and nurses and pharmacists. It's the same group of people, even though we call them Arab Israelis.

I think the reason that they are much less afraid of Palestinian citizens is because Palestinian citizens have the vote and they have citizenship, which means they have less need to turn to violence because they have some degree, they have some nonviolent mechanism of making the government listen to them. This is why South Africa became safer for white people after apartheid ended. It's why Northern Ireland became safer for Protestants after Protestant supremacy ended in Northern Ireland.

Imagine how much more dangerous the American South would be for white people if Black people had not gotten the vote in 1965. It is common for people who enjoy legal supremacy to think that if they give up legal supremacy then they will be gravely endangered. That's what white South Africans believe. It's what white Southerners believe. But it turns out it's actually wrong that equality breed safety.

Brian: When this has come up on the show in the past, people have pushed back and said, but no, look at the recent history of Jews anywhere else in the Arab world. They've been so mistreated or expelled that there's no regional basis on which to think they would be treated well as a minority in Israel or Palestine or whatever the state would be called.

Peter: I mean if you step back, actually, you find that Jews were actually were victimized and oppressed less in the Arab and Muslim world in general than they were in Europe. The Holocaust took place in Europe. Nazism emerged in Europe. In the Middle East, you had the fact there was a mass exodus and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries in the 1940s. The question you have to ask is, why did it happen at that particular time in the mid to late 1940s? It happened because of the war between Israel and the Palestinians which made being an Arab Jew, which Jews had been for centuries and centuries untenable because basically, Zionism was now at war. The Israeli state was at war with Arab countries.

I think it's really dangerous to make these essentialist claims that basically, there's something about being Arab or Muslim that means that Jews can't live safely. This is exactly what white South Africans said about the African continent. There was something about being on the continent of Africa that meant that somehow white people could never be safe without legal supremacy. In fact, Israel among its Palestinian citizens already offers us an example, even though they're second-class citizens, of a much safer reality inside Israel's 1949 lines. When you give people basic rights, it tends to create more peace for everybody.

Brian: Another listener writes in a text. Look how Hamas treats their own people. Throwing opposition off buildings, no safety in tunnels, et cetera.

Peter: Sure.

Brian: Implying why think that an Arab-led Israel or Palestine would treat Jews well?

Peter: Yes, Hamas is repressive. The Palestinian Authority is also repressive in the West Bank. It also represses its own political opposition. Israel also represses Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza because Israel is actually the one that has the ultimate authority over both of those territories. The way to deal with all of these forms of repression is to allow people to have reelections.

The reason Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank can maintain this level of oppression is Palestinians don't have elections in which they can throw their corrupt and failed leaders out. One of the reasons they don't have elections is because Israel doesn't want Palestinians to have elections and America doesn't want Palestinians to be able to have elections because we want to be able to control who runs them. The dirty little secret about Hamas is that Israel actually was very supportive of Hamas in the late 1980s when Hamas was being created. Even under Netanyahu, Israel actually allowed and supported Qatar bringing in the money that allowed Hamas to stay in power.

Brian: Hassan in Patterson, you're on WNYC with Peter Beinart. Hey, Hassan, thanks for calling in.

Hassan: Brian, good to hear your voice. I'm not feeling good. You have an excellent guest. He is right. We need to have a Republic of Jerusalem. I lost two relatives in Gaza. He's absolutely right. The problem with the Palestinian-Israeli, he's absolutely right. The world wants us to be on each other's throat. How much of blood we're going to suffer? I'm mad at you sometimes inviting the people during election for this nonsense of uncommitted. What do you mean by uncommitted? You think Trump cares about us? You think Biden cares about us? You just confess that Biden administration didn't care and Trump doesn't care. Nobody cares about Palestinian Jew.

He is absolutely right. I am so in debt with him. Even I have sick. My family is suffering from two losses in this Gaza. Two Palestinian, one child, eight years old, died, unnecessary. When we going to end this bloodshed? We have to create a country that Jews and Palestinians work together. By the way, the biggest Jewish community, your guests will tell you, 4.5 million is in Iran. The second highest Jews live in Middle East are in Iran. I have relatives. This needs to stop. We need to come to a term that we lead to one country.

First of all, right of return, Palestinian, they have to forget about it. The Jews, they have to look for the compensation. We have to have a truth commission like South Africa create a truth commission. I took your land. This was caused in 1947. This was caused in 1967. I'm going to pay you relative this much of money. Let's move on. How many bloods we going to shed? Thanks for your cares. I don't feel good. I hope you be around for next 30 years.

Brian: Hassan, thank you very much for your call. We're getting a lot of support and a lot of opposition to your position, Peter. As we finish up, do you think this is-- I mean, your book is called Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza, rather than Here's My Way that I'm Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza, which is at the moment, very much a minority opinion among Jews.

Peter: Sure, it is a minority opinion but the justice of an argument is not based, in my mind, on its popularity. We can all think about views that at certain points in human history were very unpopular, but people ultimately saw that they conformed to basic moral principles.

I wanted to just say to Hassan, who spoke, I'm so sorry for the death of your relatives. I want to say that the reason that my views have changed dramatically over the course of my life and the reason that I take positions that are often very unpopular, sometimes even among people that I love and care about in my own community, is because of my conversations over and over and over and over with Palestinians that have allowed me to see Palestinians as fully human, fully equal, deserving of the same rights that we have as Jews.

I've genuinely come to believe that Palestinian liberation will not only mean our greater safety for Jews because when Palestinians experience less violence, we will experience less violence but it will mean our liberation. Just as white Southerners felt liberated once they were no longer oppressors and white South Africans did and Protestants in Northern Ireland, it will be an experience of us of liberation to no longer hold another people under bondage.

Brian: Peter Beinart teaches national reporting and opinion writing at the Newmark Journalism School at CUNY and political science as well. He's editor at large of Jewish Currents magazine and MSNBC political commentator, author of The Beinart Notebook on Substack, and a New York Times contributing opinion writer. His op-ed related to the book is in the New York Times today.

He will be holding a book launch event at the Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan tomorrow night at 6:30, sponsored by Jewish Currents and in conversation with MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin. Admission is free, I see, for Jewish Currents members, ticketed for others. As author of the book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza, Peter, thank you for coming on and discussing it with us.

Peter: Thank you.

 

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