Episode Details

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Abdullah Awwad, a doctor in the orthopedic department of the Al Shifa Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. In his Go Fund Me page, he writes that his “once-vibrant city has been reduced to rubble” and that “we are currently living in overcrowded shelters, struggling for basic necessities like food, clean water, and medical supplies.” I’ll ask him what it’s like to work as a doctor in Gaza today.

The live call will be for paid subscribers only (due to capacity limits), but the full video will be made available Sunday to all subscribers, paid and unpaid.

Please consider supporting Abdullah and other Palestinians.

Cited in Today’s Video

Mandla Mandela on why Israel’s version of apartheid is worse than South Africa’s.

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.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, Nathan Goldman, and I answered readers’ questions.

In the Guardian, Ahmad Ibsais asks why no one believed Palestinians when they called Gaza a genocide.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, Ahmed Moor talks to Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of Holocaust memory who withdrew from teaching at Columbia after it adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

On MSNBC, I debated whether there was a meaningful difference on Gaza between Trump and Biden.

I’ll be speaking this Tuesday, September 9, at the University of Virginia.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

It was an interesting interview last week with Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, in which Mandla Mandela says that what Israel’s doing to the Palestinians is far worse—those are his words—far worse than what apartheid South Africa did to Black South Africans. And I think he’s right, and I think it’s interesting to think about why that’s turned out to be the case. It’s kind of counterintuitive on its face, because there are some Palestinians under Israeli control who have the right to vote. Palestinian citizens, so-called Israeli Arabs, have the right to vote. They’re a minority of the Palestinians under Israeli control, because most of the Palestinians under Israeli control live in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, and don’t vote, basically can’t vote.

But the fact that any Palestinians under Israeli control can vote distinguishes Israel from apartheid South Africa in which no Black South Africans had the right to vote. There were, in the 1980s, two other groups, Indians and so-called Coloreds, who got certain kinds of voting rights, but Black South Africans never did. So, for that reason, one, I think, would naturally think that Israel’s dominati