This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Brad Lander, who last week won the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York’s 10th district. Brad’s victory is a milestone: A Jewish congressman, running on his support for Palestinian rights, winning in one of the most Jewish districts in the country. Even a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable. We’ll talk about what Brad learned in his campaign, about where he agrees and disagrees with the other insurgents who won last week in New York City, about how he’ll deal with the AIPAC-aligned Jewish members of Congress he’ll meet in Washington, and about the 1920 congressional race in the Lower East Side, which he believes presaged the race he just won. This conversation will be co-sponsored by Jewish Currents. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

Scott Wiener is forced to leave the San Francisco Trans march.

The UN report on Israel’s targeting of Palestinian children.

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!), I wrote about how radically the Democratic debate over Israel has changed.

In 972mag, Abed Abu Shehada wrote about power, purity and BDS.

In her Substack, Jill Jacobs argued that one can oppose AIPAC without viewing it as uniquely malevolent.

I spoke in Vienna about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s a video that’s been going around a lot of a Democratic state senator from San Francisco named Scott Wiener. He’s also running to succeed Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, and he was at this trans march in San Francisco, and basically was kind of forced to leave the trans march by folks who really got in his face, and were really screaming at him, and are really, pretty nasty way about his policies on Gaza.

Now, they didn’t physically attack him, but it’s a pretty uncomfortable video to watch. Clearly, it was pretty intimidating behavior. And there’s another video of someone also screaming in a really nasty way, really getting in Wiener’s face at a bar where Wiener was watching a World Cup game.

And something about this video of Wiener, I think, has really triggered something in a lot of pro-Israel Jews in particular, and maybe Jews just more generally, because he looks really beleaguered and kind of haggard as he just silently takes all of this abuse. And I think it captured this sense that exists in some elements of the American Jewish community that this is kind of like torrent of hatred at Jews, and there’s kind of, like, nothing you can do about it.

And I think it’s worth saying a couple of things about this video. The first is that the people who, in these videos, who are captured in these videos, are kind of behaving like a******s. You know, they’re not physically attacking, but they’re really, really acting in a very intimidating and really kind of nasty way, and I think it’s just worth saying that I think the people that we admire, most people would admire, that certainly I admire, are people who have deep moral conviction and moral passion and fervor and are unyielding in it about what they believe is right, but still, in their interpersonal relations, in the way they treat people, act with a certain level of dignity, a certain level of decency. And I think these folks just didn’t. And I don’t think there’s a justification for just treating people that way. I don’t think you should be an a*****e.

Secondly, being an a*****e is not, I think, good politics. You know, Wiener is a classic liberal Zionist guy. He was far too late to recognize that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide, far too late to support cutting off military aid to Israel. But now he actually has come to take those positions. He’s moving in his views in response to public opinion, in response to all the work that pro-Palestine activists have done.

And it’s not effective in moving people even further—and I would like him to go further than he is now—by treating people this way. In fact, what you do, I think, is you just allow people to turn the attention in a different direction, and you just make it a lot easier for those people who want to claim that the pro-Palestinian activist movement is motivated by hatred and by, you know, that it’s a kind of mob of hooligans, whatever, that it’s antisemitic. You just make all that a lot easier with these kind of videos. So, I also think it’s counterproductive.

And—I won’t say, not but—because I think what those folks did and the way they treated him was wrong. And, it’s really important that people who support Israel in the Jewish community try to understand where this rage is coming from because what’s so frustrating to me is that you have all of these people in my community who spend so much time looking at videos like this one with Wiener, in which people seem to be getting kind of accosted and victimized in some way because they support Israel. And those folks, in my experience, spend so little time trying to understand where this rage might actually be coming from by looking at what Israel is actually doing. And because they spend almost no time looking at what Israel is doing in a way that might help them understand why so many people are enraged, that allows them to then just chalk all of this up to, kind of, to Jew hatred, right?

But imagine that these people who are watching this Scott Wiener video were also reading the new UN report that just came out about what Israel has done to Palestinian children. I’m just gonna quote a couple of things from this UN report, because I just think it reminds us, again, as if we need reminding, of the utter horror of what Israel has done, horror that normal people will understandably respond to with grave anger. Again, doesn’t mean they should be a******s about it, but anger is an understandable reaction to the kinds of things that this UN report finds.

This UN report is based on a huge amount of evidence, of documentary evidence, of interviews with medical workers, with Palestinians themselves, with journalists, with lawyers, huge amount of documentation. By the way, it also does mention violence against Israeli children on October 7th. It also, the writers of this report gave Israel, I think 13 times they asked Israel to respond to some of the claims in this report, but Israel didn’t respond to any of them because Israel never responds to these things. It never actually engages with the evidence that the UN or human rights groups create. It basically just ignores them and then denounces these reports as kind of antisemitic blood libels, right?

The report finds that Israel has killed at least 20,000 children in Gaza since October 7th, injured at least 44,000. Of the children it’s killed, at least 5,000 were under the age of 5. It’s killed more than 5,000 children under the age of 5, and more than 1,000 children under the age of 1. The report quotes an NGO, Save the Children, as suggesting that there may be even more than 5,000 children in Gaza who were buried under the rubble, whose bodies could not even be found by their families.

It mentions that Israel dropped so many bombs in Gaza, and a percentage of these bombs don’t go off until, you know, at the time, right? So that 5-10% of them don’t go off, so that within the 61 million tons of debris that exist in Gaza, you have thousands and thousands of, maybe tens of thousands of unexploded ordinances that children in Gaza will be encountering for years and decades to come, especially because Israel isn’t allowing no reconstruction in Gaza, because it’s not allowing any heavy machinery in that would allow people to actually go through this debris and maybe make it a little bit less dangerous.

They mention in this report that at least 10,000 children in Gaza have lost their hearing as a result of Israel’s attacks, that more than 1,000 children have had their limbs amputated. Many of those amputations were done without anesthesia because Israel so destroyed the medical system. That there’s more child amputees in Gaza per capita than any other place on the face of the earth.

And this killing has not stopped. It’s continuing even after the so-called ceasefire, in part because Israel has established this yellow line and basically shoots people who cross onto the wrong side of the yellow line. But the report notes that the yellow line is not clearly demarcated. It’s often shifting. And so, you have a situation in which at least 100 children since just this January have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

And they also find real evidence of targeted killing of children. The commission interviews 17 medical practitioners in different hospitals, and...