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Cited in this Week’s Video

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband tells the people who protested Gaza’s destruction that “you were right.”

British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announces that Britain will take more refugees from Gaza.

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!), Josh Lambert and Dan Sinykin explain what PEN America got wrong about antisemitism in publishing.

In The Guardian, I argued that social science explains why Israel’s supporters keep doubling down.

The Trump administration is moving to deport a Satmar Chasid from the US, allegedly because they define his anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

Register for Jewish Currents Live on October 11.

I’ll see you a week from Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Something quite extraordinary is happening in Britain. It hasn’t gotten as much attention, I think, in the United States as it should. And it has to do with the British government’s shift in policy towards Israel-Palestine. It started with the Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband saying that the British government would impose sanctions on West Bank settlements. Now, that might not seem like that big a deal because There’s not that much that’s produced just from the West Bank. So, the amount of goods that would be sanctioned would be relatively small.

But the key point is that almost everything in the West Bank depends on banks, on companies inside Israel. The Green Line doesn’t really exist in practice in terms of commerce in Israel. The West Bank settlements are being supplied by suppliers from inside Green Line Israel. They’re getting their financing from banks, from insurance companies.

And so, the point is that Miliband has started down a path that if taken to its logical conclusion, will, I think, lead the British government to not only sanction settlements themselves, but to start to go after entities, British and even Israeli, that are making possible the expansion of these settlements, the stealing of Palestinian land, the continued entrenchment of Israel’s unjust domination over Palestinians in the West Bank who lack the most basic human rights.

This is huge. You can see it in the fact that Israel’s strongest defenders, the United States, are themselves now warning about the possibility of a future in which Israeli banks, companies, insurance companies could be potentially cut off from the international financial system unless they themselves cut off settlements in the West Bank. The United States and Europe have never, ever made Israeli financial economic companies, they’ve never made them make that choice. And now it’s possible we may well get there because of what Britain is doing.

But it’s not just that. This is what’s so remarkable. Listen to the language of Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband at the Labour Party conference just last week. He says to the audience: ‘I want to say to the millions of people in this country and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people: we hear you. You were right.’

You have to watch the video to see the intensity of the response in that room, how cathartic it was in that room for people, good, decent people who have been roused because of the horrors of what they’ve seen to go out in the streets and often be kind of gaslit, demonized, even arrested, and persecuted. And some of that, unfortunately, is still going on in Britain—although I hope this government will bring that to an end—how cathartic it was to be told by the foreign secretary that they were right.

And now, even the government has gone even further. The British government has announced that it is going to, in the face of the same kind of racist nativist politics that we see in the United States, this was the British Home Secretary at that same conference: ‘the British people,’ she says, ‘have not given up on their belief that we should be compassionate, live up to our international obligations, and save the lives of those fleeing war and persecution.’

Did Joe Biden ever say that? Did Kamala Harris say that when they were confronted with Donald Trump? And to go straight at this racist nativist position, which says that we don’t care how many people die because we’re going to keep our shores closed. Indeed, we’re going to send people back to certain death.

And the government of Britain doesn’t only stop there. The Home Secretary announces that one quarter of the new refugee slots will be reserved for Afghan women and girls fleeing Taliban persecution, and for Palestinians in Gaza. That there will be [slots] set aside, particularly for refugees in Gaza.

This is on a silver platter, a template for the Democratic Party, not just the sanctions on settlements, and yes, the sanctions on entities that make those settlements possible. Not just saying loudly to the base of the Democratic Party, which has been desperate, desperate to hear it from the leaders of the Democratic Party, that those people who went out into the streets to protest against what is widely understood as a genocide in Gaza, that those people were right, that those people should be celebrated rather than slurred and condemned and often thrown out of universities and suspended and slandered.

But beyond that, for the Democrats to do what the British government is now doing and saying, frankly, that we are going to allow refugees in and particularly because of the horrifying complicity of the United States government in the destruction of the Gaza Strip, and the genocide in the Gaza Strip, that the United States will make a special point of allowing Palestinians from Gaza to come into the United States.

Now, it’s important to say that it must also be said that those people must have the right to return, right? So, this doesn’t become a backdoor form of ethnic cleansing when Israel says, sure, you’re welcome to leave, but you’re never going to be allowed to return. The Palestinians must have the right to return to Gaza, or if they come from the West Bank. And indeed, I believe that in the long run, the solution must be that Palestinians from Gaza or from the West Bank whose families were expelled have the right to return to the places from which they were expelled in 1948.

But imagine if a Democratic Party politician, if people running for president in 2028 said: our party was wrong. What we did was wrong. And as a down payment on a kind of political repentance, we are going to start opening America’s doors to Palestinians who are still living in horrifying conditions in Gaza. And the Home Secretary of Britain also makes the point that communities will be allowed to sponsor people from Gaza and bring them to the United Kingdom. And that universities, there will be a university sponsorship route where universities can sponsor students from Gaza.

Just imagine we as a Jewish community in the United States have a massive tikkun to do. There’s a massive amount of repair and tikkun, repair and tshuva—repentance—for what our community has done, what our community leaders have done. Imagine if dozens, hundreds of synagogues were to band together in a similar community sponsorship program and say, our synagogue, we’ll sponsor people from Gaza coming into the United States as a kind of a repair, a tikkun, and as an act of repentance for what has been done in the name of the Jewish people to the Palestinians of Gaza. That we will raise the funds, that we will organize to make sure that people can come and start a new life here, and if they want, ultimately, hopefully go back to an Israel-Palestine where they can be equal and live dignified, free lives.

And imagine if all of these universities whose presidents acted in such shameful ways, capitulating to donor pressure, also as an act of repair and repentance said, we are going to set aside scholarships for Palestinians from Gaza because we know that we have an account to settle with the people of Gaza and with those protesters on our own campuses who we so badly mistreated. And they also said, like Ed Miliband said: say you were right.

There’s a profound amount of healing that needs to take place. And we are just beginning to think about what it would mean to try to move towards justice in the wake of the truly evil things that we’ve seen over the past few years. The evil of the Hamas attacks against civilians, and then the evil of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the evil that continues as Palestinians are forced from their homes in the West Bank and Palestinians still live in horrifying conditions in Gaza.

And this, it seems to me, is a model for how you begin to do that. The British have shown the way. The Democratic Party needs to use that template and make it the basis for what they say to their own party and to the American people going forward towards 2028.

We discuss:

• Their personal journeys out of Zionism

• Why are some Jews more likely than others to question the beliefs they grew up with?

• How to navigate ethnocentrism and racism in Jewish texts

• Are women more likely to question pro-Israel narratives than men?

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