Episode Details

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza.

This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guests will be the former PLO negotiator Hussein Agha and the former Clinton, Obama and Biden administration official, Rob Malley. They’ll talk about their new book, Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. I’ll ask what they’ve learned from decades of seeing Israeli, Palestinian and American policy from the inside.

Cited in Today’s Video

Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s essay on colonialism and terrorism.

Mouin Rabbani on the Trump plan.

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!), Avigayil Halperin talks to Audrey Sasson about whether it’s possible to atone for genocide.

39% of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide.

Washington Democrats turn against AIPAC.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, I have these two kind of contradictory feelings about the Trump plan on Gaza. The first is that I hope it goes through. I hope it’s implemented. I just desperately, desperately hope that these Israeli hostages are returned and can go back to their families. And I desperately hope that Palestinians can wake up one day in the coming days, and just not worry that they’ll be killed by an Israeli bomb, and that their children will be able to have more to eat. I mean, just at a basic human level, that would be a really just a blessing.

It’s also, though, really important just to remember, because I think there’s a certain kind of discourse that tends to take place about these diplomatic negotiations, a kind of insider-y discourse about how it’s going to be implemented, and what the role the Palestinian Authority is going to play, and what different Arab governments are going to do, and all this stuff, which just can often, I just find, kind of, like, completely obscure, like, the basic foundational realities, which always need to be kept front and center, right?

The basic foundational realities are that Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem live under the control of a state that does not grant them the most basic of rights, the right of citizenship. This state, the Israeli state, has life and death power over them, and yet they can’t vote for that government that controls their lives. This will be true after the Trump plan is implemented, if it’s implemented. It may be that the genocide ends, which would be a blessing, but before the genocide, there was apartheid, and there will be actually an even worse form of apartheid now because Israel’s blockade of Gaza is likely to be stricter, and Israel’s already said that it’s basically going to take more control over parts of the Gaza Strip, herding Palestinians even into an even smaller area of the Gaza Strip.

So, remember, Gaza was deemed unlivable by the United Nations before October 7th. Human Rights Watch called it an open-air prison. My friend Mohammad Shehada has written about how everyone he knew in