Episode Details

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Mikhael Manekin. For me, some of the most unsettling scenes from Gaza have been the images of Jewish worship— a soldier using a knife as his yad (pointer) as he reads Torah, a soldier reciting the Shema from the balcony of a mosque, soldiers singing to welcome Shabbat at the Islamic University of Gaza. It’s not the liturgy itself that unnerves me. It’s the images of religious conquest, which make me fear this war’s consequences not just for Palestinians and Israelis, but for Judaism. Mikhael is the perfect person to ask about this. He’s one of the leaders of Faithful Left, a new movement of religious Israelis fighting Occupation and ethnic superiority. He’s a former director of Breaking the Silence, the organization of former Israeli soldiers that works to expose the reality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And he’s the author of a new book about violence, morality and Judaism entitled, End of Days: Ethics, Tradition and Power in Israel.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Benjamin Netanyahu demands that Palestinians in Gaza be “deradicalized.”

The UN estimates that 85 percent of people in Gaza have been displaced their homes.

The Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza estimates that 40 percent of the Strip’s people risk starvation.

According to The Wall Street Journal, almost 70 percent of Gaza’s homes are destroyed or damaged.

Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, warns that in the coming year, 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza could die of disease.

Mairav Zonszein on the absence of Palestinians in Israeli media.

In a December poll, 83 percent of Israeli Jews said they support encouraging “voluntary migration” from Gaza.

Nikki Haley says Palestinians in Gaza should leave.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessa