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Cited in Today’s Video

The five stages of grief.

Rahm Emanuel’s speech in Tel Aviv.

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!), Charlotte Ritz-Jack reports on how Israel’s withholding of tax revenues is undermining education in the West Bank.

Ro Khanna gets a taste of Palestinian life in the West Bank.

John Judis on what Democrats should learn from the Graham Platner fiasco.

On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I’ve been thinking about the speech that Rahm Emanuel gave in Tel Aviv last week, and I think it could be understood as a form of bargaining. I’m taking that term from these famous five stages of grief from the psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. She says the five stages—I’m sure many of you have heard this before—are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I think if you look at the way that supporters of Israel have responded to this huge shift that we’re seeing in the United States, I think you can see it move through these stages.

So, it wasn’t that long ago that the standard line from people who wanted to maintain unconditional U.S. support for Israel was denial that the public opinion had changed, that the United States was no longer an overwhelmingly pro-Israel country in the sense that it wanted America to give Israel unconditional military and diplomatic support. And I think more recently, you’ve seen the second stage, which is anger, which is kind of like, you know, fury that there’s this kind of new anti-Israel, even anti-Zionist politics, and of course, generally defined from within the pro-Israel space as a kind of a tsunami of antisemitism.

But Rahm Emanuel’s speech, I think, is a third phase, which is bargaining. Now, Rahm Emanuel had always been, you know, a supporter of unconditional U.S. support for Israel, kind of on the liberal side, but certainly he had never supported the kind of sanctions that he’s talking about before. And I think Rahm Emanuel is now trying to essentially bargain with this new politics, which is emerging in the Democratic Party, and also among young Republicans, and trying to say, okay, the US is going to now pressure Israel more than it has, and especially put sanctions on the West Bank, and there can be a new bargain.

I think the problem—and I think, by the way, that the fourth stage, depression, is something we may start to see evidence of in the years to come as well. By depression, I mean people kind of bemoaning the fact that they’ve lost the American public, maybe doing a version, a pro-Israel Jewish version, even of what was called the Benedictine option, which was something we saw among Christian conservatives during the Obama years, where they said, we’ve lost the country. It’s becoming irredeemably progressive and woke. We need to retreat from it into our own kind of enclaves where we can maintain our own virtues. But in this case, being pro-Israel, you know, create your own institutions, this kind of thing.

But to go back to the nature of the bargain that Rahm Emanuel is suggesting. It is a significant step forward in that it is an end to unconditional U.S. support for Israel. It would be some form of pressure, although the devil is in the details, if you listen to the speech, that the United States would push Israel to be willing to negotiate towards the idea of a Palestinian state.

The problem with the bargain is, I think, in the way that Rahm Emanuel thinks about Palestinians, or you could say doesn’t think that much about Palestinians. So, the first thing that Emanuel says in his speech is he repeats this old kind of chestnut that basically Israel has again and again offered Palestinians everything they should have wanted, and then they said no. This is just really historically inaccurate. I mean, it’s repeated so frequently. It’s like mother’s milk for those of us who kind of grew up in pro-Israel Jewish environments. But really, there are very few, if any, historians who actually believe that as a rendition of what actually happened.

And it’s just also important to remember, you know, that Rahm Emanuel is saying that three times Israel offered Palestinian sovereignty. It’s really not true. Israel didn’t offer Palestinian sovereignty at all. When you say that Israel has to have, for instance, that the Palestinian state can’t have a military, and that Israel is going to have some control over its air flight, the airspace, the telecommunication spectrum, troops on part of Palestinian territory in the Jordan Valley, that is not actual sovereignty. There’s something inaccurate about Rahm Emanuel’s kind of precondition for this bargain that he’s suggesting.

But then, if you notice the way he goes on to talk about Palestinian leadership in the speech, he has this line where he says the Arab world must assume ‘its rightful place as the adult in the room with the Palestinian leadership.’ So, the clear implication is that the Arabs, as the proxies—by probably means the Saudis and the Emiratis, and maybe the Qataris—as the proxies of the United States, are going to force the Palestinians into accepting things that maybe they weren’t willing to accept in the past. What’s totally missing is the idea that Palestinians should be able to choose their own leaders, and that Palestinians should have the space to actually define for themselves their vision of what they want their freedom to look like. Now, again, that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be a negotiation process with the Israelis.

But what Rahm Emanuel skips is taking seriously Palestinian politics and the right of Palestinians to actually choose a legitimate leadership for themselves. The implication is that essentially America and the Arabs will tell the Palestinians what to do, and then the US will move Israel aways, and then force the Palestinians to accept what Israel is now willing to offer.

That actually is part of the reason, actually, I think that the Oslo process failed, right? And it’s especially problematic today when Palestinians have not for many, many years had the opportunity to have a legitimate democratic process to choose legitimate leaders who can offer a vision of Palestinian freedom. And the whole notion of the idea that Palestinian freedom is central to this conversation as opposed to simply, you know, saving Israel from itself is really missing from the bargain that Rahm Emanuel is offering.

So, that’s why I think that, again, this represents a kind of progress, but the nature of the bargain that Rahm Emanuel is offering, I still think fundamentally doesn’t take seriously the notion that Palestinians have an inalienable right to freedom, and that they have the right to choose their own leaders, not have them chosen for themselves for them. That’s the part of the bargain that Rahm Emanuel, I think, is getting wrong, and it’s why we’re going to need people to come along who are going to revise that, and I think offer a new kind of formulation which centers the fact that this U.S. policy is not only about saving Israel from itself, that U.S. policy has to have at its center the belief that Palestinians deserve to be free.