The Outgoing Secretary of State’s Astonishing Interview with the New York Times

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 10, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.

Our guest will be the Israeli-born British journalist Rachel Shabi, author of the new book, Off-White: The Truth about Antisemitism. Last week, she published a column on the subject in The Guardian. She’s particularly knowledge about antisemitism, and its weaponization, in Britain, a subject of ferocious contention since Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader. We’ll discuss all that on Friday.

I’ve also recorded an interview with the Israeli religious thinker and activist Mikhael Manekin, one of the founders of smol emuni, the faithful left. We discussed Mikhael’s new book, so far available only in Hebrew, entitled, Sermons from the Abyss, which uses the five Megillot that Jews read during the year in synagogue to reflect on the horrors of the last several years. I don’t know of any Jewish thinker who is grappling more deeply than Mikhael with the theological ramifications of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. This call, which I’ll post this Wednesday, is for paid subscribers too.

My New Book

On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

The New York Times’ interview with Antony Blinken.

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!), Theia Chatelle details the Yale police department’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters.

An extraordinary interview with Muhammad Shehada about realities in Gaza.

A song about living in a society that is committing genocide.

I talked to the CBC about why Jimmy Carter deserves an apology.

See you on Friday, January 10,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken did a big interview with the New York Times this weekend about his legacy, the Biden administration’s legacy. And a big part of that interview was about Gaza. And I think it’s worth noting a number of things he said because I think they show the way in which people like Blinken live inside kind of intellectual and moral prison, in which basic truths are things that they cannot bring themselves to see or will not bring themselves to see. And they end up saying these things which are completely, utterly incoherent, and I think just morally inexcusable.

And so, the first thing that’s striking if you listen to Blinken’s comments on Gaza is that for him, the problem of Gaza and Palestinians in Gaza is a problem that begins on October 7th. He says, ‘since October 7th,’ this is Blinken, ‘we’ve had some core goals in mind. And what are those goals,’ he says, ‘make sure October 7th can’t happen again, prevent a wider war, and protect Palestinian civilians.’ Now, what he means by make sure October 7th can’t happen again, and he says it explicitly, is destroying Hamas’s military capacity, right. There’s no recognition that October 7th doesn’t just happen because Hamas has a bunch of weapons. October 7th happens because Palestinians are living in what Human Rights Watch calls an open-air prison, what the UN has said is a place that’s unlivable. This is before October 7th. That Palestinians are living in what all the world’s major human rights organizations call an apartheid state, right. All of that is completely absent.

So, Blinken thinks that the problem that he’s trying to solve begins on October 7th. And then he says astonishingly, he says, ‘when it comes to making sure that October 7th can’t happen again, I think we’re in a good place.’ No, you’re not in a good place. Not only because Gaza has been utterly destroyed, but you’re not in a good place in terms of making sure that things like October 7th can’t happen again because the fundamental reason behind the horror of October 7th isn’t just because Hamas has a bunch of weapons, it’s because Palestinians don’t have freedom, and because their ethical and legal paths towards fighting for freedom—whether it’s boycotts, efforts at international institutions, all of these things, peaceful marches like happened in 2018—that they have all been blocked. That’s the context if you really want to make sure that future October 7ths don’t happen, you have to address that. But that’s basically completely absent from Blinken’s framework.

And what’s really striking is it’s so striking how Blinken is able to empathize with Jewish Israelis in a way that he can’t empathize with Palestinians. So, he says, this is Blinken, he says, ‘you had in Israel in the days after October 7th a totally traumatized society. This wasn’t just the Prime Minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza.’ He says Israelis didn’t want any assistance to go to Gaza after October 7th. And he says you have to kind of understand that given the trauma in that society.

First of all, you notice the way in which he buys completely into the ethno-nationalist frame, right? What does he mean by society? Twenty percent of Israel’s own citizens are Palestinians—Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called Arab Israelis. They wanted assistance to go into Gaza. So, you notice that when Blinken talks about Israeli society, he’s actually only talking about Jews, as if even the Palestinian citizens in Israel don’t actually matter, are not actually real Israelis. He’s completely bought into this ethno-nationalist framework. And then he says, yes, it’s unfortunate that they didn’t want any aid to go into Gaza. But after all, you have to understand they were really traumatized, right.

But there’s no recognition, right, that in understanding October 7th, and the horror of what Hamas and others did on October 7th, that it might be worth understanding that Palestinians were also totally traumatized, and that we should factor that in in understanding their actions—again, not excusing their action, but in understanding their action, right. So, Blinken can see Israelis through this kind of empathetic humanizing frame in a way he can’t vis-a-vis Palestinians.

The second point is the way Blinken talks about America’s leverage vis-a-vis Israel. He essentially talks about the US relationship with Israel as if America doesn’t give Israel weapons, or as if the notion that we would actually question whether we give Israel these weapons simply cannot be discussed, right. It’s completely outside of his mental framework, right. So, he says, ‘no one needs to remind me of the sufferings’—this is Palestinians—‘because it’s something that drives me every single day.’ Okay, so first of all, let’s just be honest. That’s b******t. It’s a bold-faced lie. Antony Blinken might say that to make him fall asleep at night, but nothing in his actual actions suggests that he’s driven every single day by Palestinians suffering in Gaza because he keeps supporting the sending of those weapons, right.

And when he says, ‘we’ve done everything in our power to find a way to get to the end of the conflict,’ that statement only makes sense if somehow the question of US arms sales to Israel, right, is kind of an exogenous question, as if that doesn’t bear on American behavior, right. But it’s the single most important factor, right. That America is literally giving Israel ...