The Closing of the Establishment Jewish Mind

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Sabri Jiryis, who for more than half a century has been among the most important Palestinian intellectuals trying to understand Zionism and promote Palestinian freedom. As a young man, he helped found al-Ard, the first Palestinian political movement in Israel, which called for Palestinian national rights and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1966, he wrote The Arabs in Israel, his landmark book on the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the Nakba. In 1970, Jiryis was exiled to Lebanon, where he became a close advisor to Yaser Arafat and director of the Palestine Research Center, the research and publication center of the PLO. In 1977, he published the first volume of his seminal Arabic-language book, A History of Zionism, and followed it up with a second volume in 1986. That book has now been translated into English by his daughter Fida. Following the Oslo Accords, Jiryis was one of the few Palestinians allowed to return to Israel and now lives in his native village, in the Galilee. We will discuss his understanding of Zionism, and his extraordinary life, on Friday.

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Cited in Today’s Video

The open letter claiming that accusing Israel of genocide constitutes a “blood libel.”

The letter’s link to one paper published on the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ website accusing Hamas of genocide.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars accuses Israel of genocide.

Scholars estimate that Israel has killed roughly 100,000 people in 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!), Daniel May writes about the lessons of Minneapolis’s resistance to ICE.

In 972Mag, Sophia Goodfriend explains how ICE is adapting surveillance practices pioneered by Israel.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed Adalah’s Myssana Morany and B’Tselem’s Sarit Michaeli about the forced displacement of Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Naqab/Negev.

Appearances

On February 17, I’ll be speaking on a panel for the World Policy Forum about Muslim-Christian-Jewish Coexistence in the Holy Land.

On February 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 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s this open letter which has been signed by a bunch of people that accusing Israel of genocide constitutes a blood libel. Some of the initial signatories are the Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Shmuly Yankolovich. I mention them in particular because part of what is so depressing to me, dispiriting to me about this letter, is that these are people who, in other aspects of their lives, I actually think are really, really talented and thoughtful people.

I mean, Yossi Klein Halevi—I disagree with his political views—but he’s a very talented narrative journalist. If you read books of his, like, you know, We Were Like Dreamers about the Israeli soldiers in the 1967 war and what happened to them. Yitz Greenberg is one of the most important American rabbis of his generation, really a giant in the kind of field of post-Holocaust theology who shaped, you know, whole generations of Orthodox American Jews. Shmuly Yankielovich, who’s based in the United States, runs an Orthodox organization that, in domestic American politics, on questions of the rights of immigrants, on opposing ICE, has actually done some really, really, you know, wonderful, wonderful work.

And so, this letter, to me is a kind of an example of how there’s something about this question, about the question of Israel and the Palestinians that I think takes people’s best qualities—their qualities of intellectual curiosity, and their qualities of empathy—and it kind of drains them. And this letter, I think, is a specimen of kind of what has happened to establishment American Jewish and Israeli discourse.

And I just want to explain why I find it so dispiriting. The first point is if you wanted to write an intellectually and morally honest, you know, letter opposing the claim that Israel has committed genocide—you know, and to be fair, genocide is a very particular kind of crime, right? It’s different than crimes against humanity, for instance, right? Genocide has to do with intent. One could make an intellectually honest argument that Israel has not met the standard of genocide. But to be intellectually honest, you would have to start by acknowledging what Israel actually has done, right? That whatever term you claim it meets under international law, just talk about the brute facts of what has happened on the ground, right?

The best scholars we have in terms of estimating direct and indirect deaths from war now suggest that Israel has killed 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Remember, Gaza’s not a big place, right? It’s only a bit more than 2 million people. 100,000 people, right? That Gaza has the largest population of child amputees per capita of any place in the world. That 80% of the homes have been destroyed. That 70% of farmland has been destroyed. And the reconstruction is not happening, right? In fact, what’s actually happened is Israel has cut the Gaza Strip in half and now confined people in Gaza in this completely destroyed area, where there’s no concrete coming in to actually rebuild homes. Israel has basically confined that population into only now half of the Gaza Strip.

So, if you want to argue this is a genocide, okay, but at least ask yourself what the human cost has been, right? There’s nothing in this open letter which does that at all. This is the closest you get. This is the closest you get. I’m gonna read the sentence. It says: ‘There is a vigorous debate within the Jewish community over aspects of how this war was fought, and that is a sign of moral health. So is our pain over every innocent life lost.’

So, you noticed the only acknowledgement of any Palestinian death and suffering at all is turned into a kind of self-congratulatory claim about Jews that actually Jews are so moral because we are pained by this, right? And because we’re having a debate about it, right? So, it’s actually, to me, the very opposite of a kind of moral reckoning with what’s happening, which I think, again, to be honest in arguing against genocide, you would have to have some human reckoning with what actually Israel has done, even if you want to say it shouldn’t be called genocide.

The second thing that’s so dishonest about this open letter is that intellectually honest arguments acknowledge the arguments and face the arguments of people on the other side and try to respond to them, right? This letter does not acknowledge that among the groups that have said Israel is committing genocide are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem—an Israeli human rights organization—Physicians for Human Rights, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, right? It doesn’t acknowledge any of that. It doesn’t actually answer their arguments, which have been documented hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports from on the ground reporting from people, you know, in Gaza.

And in fact, what’s even more remarkable, is that the authors of the letter claim that Israel has not committed genocide, but that Hamas was trying to commit a genocide. And to support that claim, they link to an essay written by a scholar that was posted on the website of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, right? Now, just think about this for a minute. The International Association of Genocide Scholars, as an organization, has claimed that Israel is committing genocide. This letter never acknowledges that. But to buttress its claim that Hamas was committing genocide, it cites one essay that was published on the website of this organization, while never acknowledging that the very organization whose website they are linking to has actually argued that Israel is committing genocide, right? That’s what intellectual dishonesty looks like.

And the third point about the letter is the use of this term, blood libel, right? You could argue that you don’t think Israel has committed genocide. But why on earth call it a blood libel, right? A blood libel: the term comes from the claim in medieval Europe that Christians made that Jews were using the blood of Christian children to bake matzah. That’s where the term blood libel comes from, right?

How can anyone seriously argue, right, that a claim of genocide that has been made by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Israel’s own human rights organization, B’Tselem, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—the most well-known human rights organizations in the world—Israeli-born Holocaust and genocide scholars like Amos Goldberg, Omer Bartov, Roz Siegel, Shmuel Lederman. This is the equivalent, you’re claiming, of Christians in medieval Europe saying that Jews were using the blood of Christian children to bake matzah? It’s just completely absurd. It’s an example of just how far down the rabbit hole this kind of establishment pro-Israel discourse has gone.

And the use of the term blood libel is designed specifically to make this conversation, to turn it away from a conversation of what Israel’s actually done, and to force it, straitjacket it back into this idea that the story here is a story of eternal antisemitism, which fundamentally never changes, which Jews are always the victim of a Jew-hating world, and therefore Palestinians and their supporters are simply the reincarnation of those Christians in medieval Europe who accused Jews of using Christian children to bake matzah, right?

This narrative, it becomes a way of basically not turning your attention away from all of the facts that you intellectually and morally should be having to face about what Israel has actually done and doing to Palestinians, and basically turning it in a direction that you can pretend that the real story here is the story of the fact that the world has not changed since the blood libels of medieval Europe.

It’s so dehumanizing towards Palestinians to put them in this position of the reoccurrence of the eternal antisemite. It so much denies them the right to have the dignity of their own story and their own experience, that it itself contributes this dehumanization of Palestinians by suggesting that they’re the equivalent of the Nazis, that they’re the equivalent of the pogromists of Tsarist Russia, that they’re the equivalent of the blood libelists of medieval Europe. It itself is part of the process of dehumanization that makes what Israel did in Gaza possible and contributes to the possibility of Israel doing something like that again.

That by claiming that a claim of genocide made by the world’s leading human rights scholars, some of whom are Jewish and some of whom were Israeli-born, by claiming that that is a blood libel, what you are actually doing is a process of dehumanization that actually makes future acts of genocide against Palestinians more likely.

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