Berkeley Has a Tough Task Ahead of It

I just finished a draft article (now before law reviews!) entitled "They Managed a Protest: Prohibitory, Ethical, and Prudential Policing of Academic Speech." As the name implies, it addresses recent controversies regarding free speech on campus, though the framing device is the Kyle Duncan incident at Stanford Law which these days feels almost quaint. In any event, one of my main objectives in the paper is to explore the position of the university administrators -- often untenured -- who are tasked with enforcing free speech policies in the context of campus protests. They occupy difficult positions, not the least because many external observers think their position is easy -- just severely punish disruptive protesters and call it day. What could be simpler than that?

Of course, things aren't as simple as that, even in the seemingly clearest cases. Earlier this week, a group of protesters organized by the "Bears for Palestine" student organization managed to violently shut down a scheduled talk by a right-wing Israeli speaker at UC-Berkeley. Protesters smashed windows and the door of the building where the talk was scheduled to occur, and allegedly assaulted and slurred Jewish students trying to attend the event.

There's little question that this behavior violated UC-Berkeley policy and, probably, state law. The UC-Berkeley Chancellor, Carol Christ, has written a strong statement denouncing these actions. And for my part, as much as I respect the right of students to engage in protest, the allegations of what happened in this event are such that severe punishment -- including potentially suspensions or expulsions -- would seem to be warranted for at least the most serious offenders. To that extent, this is a simple case.

Even still, though, I do not envy the Student Affairs officials* who are tasked with operationalizing that simple case into actual disciplinary action.

To begin, it is abundantly clear that Berkeley is under immense pressure to significantly punish someone. If at the end of their process nobody gets more than a slap on the wrist for violations of this magnitude, they will be accused of turning a blind eye to this sort of behavior, or even tacitly sanctioning it. It needs, at the end of this, to put a few heads on pikes.

But to that end, while I suspect that Berkeley will be able to identify many of the students present at the protest, it likely will not be easy to figure who exactly is responsible for the more egregious acts that would justify the harshest punishment (the antisemitic slurs, the destruction of university property). Many protesters wore masks, and the group itself was comprised of students and non-students. 

So what is the university to do? It could adopt a policy wherein it just throws the book at everyone -- "expel 'em all and let God sort it out." But that sort of short-circuiting of normal due process protections will generate intense backlash and possibly make them vulnerable to a lawsuit. Breaking windows, smashing doors; these are violations of university speech policies. But -- depending on what went down at the event -- being in the vicinity of those actions, without participating in them, may not be. It's the difference between attending Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally versus actually breaching the Capitol. One might not think the former are good people, but they haven't done anything illegal.

In short, there are severe cross-cutting pressures at play here that make reaching even the "simple" right outcome harder than it appears. Those pressures are amplified by the very loud voices on both ends of the spectrum, some of whom will insist that nothing short of a complete extirpation of all pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus means capitulation, others of whom will fulminate that any consequence to any righteous protester on any ground is tantamount to jackbooted censorial thuggery. While we can perhaps justly demand that Student Affairs professionals ignore those voices (easier said than done), their presence, too, complicates significantly the more legitimate problems the office will face in its quest to come to a good decision.

* Disclosure: My wife works in the UC-Berkeley Student Affairs Division, albeit not in a role that has anything to do with meting out student discipline.

The Uncommitted Story

Last night, Joe Biden won the Michigan primary with approximately 81% of the vote. Donald Trump also won with 68% of the vote (you wouldn't necessarily clock that Trump did comparatively worse than Biden given the coverage, but that's hardly a surprise anymore). But while the foregone conclusion outcome isn't super interesting, many people have been keeping an eye on the relative performance of "uncommitted" in the Democratic column. 

For those of you who don't know, a campaign largely emanating from Michigan's substantial Arab and Muslim community urged Democratic primary voters to cast a ballot for "uncommitted" as a means of signaling discontent with President Biden's support for Israel in the war in Gaza. A few days ago, I registered my genuine curiosity regarding how "uncommitted" would play out in the Michigan Democratic primary. On the one hand, I said, I absolutely could see it "capturing genuine frustration amongst [Democratic] partisans (so getting substantial support)." On the other, I also could see it "mostly an online/activisty thing (so being a nothing burger come the actual vote tallies)." Since both hypotheses seemed plausible, I was genuinely interested to see what the reality would be.

Towards the start of the evening (with, as I recall, approximately 20% of the votes tallied), I wrote the following:

If “uncommitted” typically gets 10% and it holds at 16% (which it may not, in either direction), I’d say that’s not a huge performance (6% over baseline) but still meaningful given how tight MI will be. It’s not something that should be ignored; but neither is it “popular groundswell of rebellion”.

The "10%" baseline is based on the last analogous election where an incumbent Democrat was running -- Barack Obama in 2012. Ten percent (10.7%, to be precise) of Democratic voters then voted "uncommitted" despite there not being (to my knowledge) any significant organized campaign pushing for the vote, suggesting that this is baseline level of support for "uncommitted" that isn't attributable to anything more than inchoate background status quo discontent. Given that, my assessment was that getting an additional six percentage points of support is not trivial, but also isn't proof of some broad-based sentiments of frustration and opposition.

As I said, though, the tally was early and things might change in either direction over the course of the evening. I saw some people suggest that they expected the number to rise as the night went on, on the theory that "bluer" jurisdictions like cities were going to report later and the assumption that "uncommitted" voters would be more prevalent in those areas. But what ended up happening is that "uncommitted" faded over the course of the evening, finally settling at 13.2% -- about 2.5% over the baseline expectation (it's also below the 15% threshold necessary to pick up statewide delegates at the DNC, though it did get two delegates due to strong local performances).

From my vantage point, this really can't be said to be that impressive of a performance. It still matters in the sense that Michigan will likely be close and so every little bit counts. But ultimately, a well-organized campaign, with the support of some significant local Democratic figures (albeit opposition from many others) managing to overperform doing nothing by 2.5% really doesn't demonstrate much in the way of serious political muscle. I don't want to say the frustration that the "uncommitted" campaign is tapping into isn't real. But objectively speaking, it doesn't seem to be translating into significant alterations in Democratic voter behavior -- to that extent, it may be a largely cloistered thing. If I'm the Biden campaign, I'm certainly not ignoring this issue (for a variety of reasons, not the least being that its salience to activist, elite, and media cadres clearly punches above its weight, and then also because one wants to do the right thing and have a good policy that takes into account the views of all relevant stakeholders). But I think we've dispensed with the need for incipient panic.

That said, the "uncommitted" campaign did a wonderful job of setting expectations. The nice thing about a symbolic play like this is that since an objective win is obviously off the table (and not the realistic goal) pretty much anything can be sold as a victory. If you lose an actual election, you have to (well, I guess we've learned you don't have to) concede defeat. If you're not actually running to win but instead are just trying to trumpet your existence as a voting bloc, however, there's essentially no outcome where one has to "concede defeat". You will never see organizers release a statement to the effect of:

Our goal was to demonstrate that the people of Michigan care about X issue and that our values cannot be ignored. But given our anemic performance, the voters today have made clear that Michigan voters don't care about X at all and that we completely overestimated our influence. Thanks to everyone for taking part in this civic experiment, and we'll adjust our priors accordingly.

Here, the uncommitted organizers really basically set their bar on the floor -- they said their goal was to get 10,000 votes for "uncommitted", and they are celebrating for blowing past that tally. On the one hand, 10,000 is not a completely made-up figure -- it was roughly Donald Trump's margin of victory in 2016. On the other hand, in this primary 10,000 votes would have been barely over 1% of the total tally -- less than half of Dean Phillips' tally and a tenth of the Obama 2012 baseline. It is true that turnout is up considerably since 2012 (10.7% then was a little less than 21,000 votes; 13.2% in 2024 is over 100,000 votes) -- but it's hard to view that as bad news for Democrats.

The other observation I want to make relates to that prediction I saw that the "uncommitted" tally would rise as bluer, urban jurisdictions came in, when the reality was that "uncommitted" faded over the course of the evening. I wasn't following the returns closely enough to confirm whether the bluer areas were in fact reporting later. Assuming that they did, though, I think this is a good time to correct another common and understandable misapprehension: that the most partisan Democratic areas of a state are also necessarily the most progressive.

It's an understandable inference. In a two-party system, we might imagine that a voter who is only slightly left-of-center would regularly be at least tempted to vote GOP (given the "right" candidates), a voter who is more decisively liberal would be less likely to crossover, and the most liberal voter would also be the least likely to be tempted away to the other party. From that, we would infer that the most partisan Democratic voters (those least likely to ever vote Republican) are also the most progressive voters (there preferences are furthest away from those of Republicans).

But it isn't necessarily true. At one level, it's falsified by the presence of "both parties are the same" uber-leftists -- such persons may or may not be tempted to vote GOP, but they're obviously not Democratic partisans. The most partisan Democratic clusters are persons who are probably progressive enough not to be tempted by the GOP, but also not so left-wing that they find arguments like that appealing. But beyond that, there's more that goes into committed Democratic Party loyalty than ideological alignment. We know, for instance, that African-American voters are the most committed Democrats and that African-American Democrats are more likely to identify as moderate or conservative compared to White Democrats. There are other factors beyond ideology that are significantly responsible for why Black voters are Democratic loyalists. Likewise, the post 9/11 trend whereby Muslim voters overwhelmingly voted Democratic also was not primarily a feature of deep-seated ideological leftism -- it stemmed from "other factors" (i.e., rampant GOP Islamophobia) which superseded still-extant ideological moderation or even conservatism.

All of this is to say that the assumption that Black voters, because they are steadfast Democratic voters, also must sit on the left edge of the party on an ideological level, is a mistaken apprehension, and consequently the sorts of issues that are motivating the ideological left-edge of the party are not necessarily the same ones that motivate the base of the party. This isn't to say that the Democratic base is actually conservative; it's still probably true that it is relatively to the left of the average person who votes Democrat in any given November. It's just not all the way at the left-most edge of the party. That mistake, I suspect, is a large part of what generated the wrong assumption that "uncommitted" would perform substantially better in those locales.

For what it's worth, on a very quick gaze there doesn't seem to be much correlation between the Black vote and "uncommitted"; if anything, it seems to have underperformed. The overall Black population of Michigan is approximately 14%, and there are four counties which have proportionally larger Black populations than that: Wayne County (Detroit and Dearborn), Genesee County (Flint), Saginaw County (Saginaw), and Berrien County (St. Joseph) (Oakland County, north of Detroit, is exactly 14% Black).

Wayne County saw "uncommitted" get 16% -- but that's almost certainly more a product of Dearborn than Detroit (disaggregating those figures would be very interesting, but the fact that "uncommitted" outright won in Dearborn and Hamtramck, both of which are approximately half Arab-American, mathematically suggests it did much weaker numbers elsewhere in the county). By contrast, Genesee County, which contains Flint, saw "uncommitted" have one of its worst performances -- 9.5%. Saginaw County saw "uncommitted" get 10.2%, Berrien County 9.6%, and Oakland County 12.5%.

Plot "uncommitted" based on the most Democratic parts of the state (based on 2020 Democratic vote share), and things similarly look blurry at best. Joe Biden only won 11 counties in Michigan last time around. He won all of the above-mentioned counties except Berrien, plus Washtenaw (Ann Arbor), Ingham (Lansing), Kalamazoo (Kalamazoo), Kent (Grand Rapids), Muskegon (Muskegon), Leelanau (Traverse Bay), and Marquette (Marquette, on the upper peninsula). "Uncommitted" had possibly its best performance in the entire state in Washtenaw County, at 17.2% -- certainly a product of the University of Michigan community. And it did slightly better than its statewide average in Kent County (13.8%). But in every other county Joe Biden won, "uncommitted" underperformed its statewide average -- from 13.1% in Ingham to 9.1% in Saginaw. That said, the two counties "uncommitted" performed best in (Wayne and Washtenaw) are two of the heaviest Democratic hitters (along with Oakland) in terms of raw Democratic vote margins; the other counties listed, while won by Democrats, tend to be either smaller or closer (or both). 

So I'd say these results are mixed, and again, my advice to Biden isn't to just ignore this issue outright. Rather, it's to observe that the coalitional politics that drove the "uncommitted" movement are distinct from "the base" (and, in particular, Black voters). That's an important thing -- democracy is about appealing to diverse constituencies who have an array of distinct and differentiated interests, and this issue certainly had strong salience amongst Michigan's Arab and Muslim community, plus a fair amount of weight in the collegiate environs of Ann Arbor -- but it's not necessarily the same thing as it's been presented.

Dealing with the Deal After the Day After

Bibi Netanyahu has finally released a "day after" plan for Gaza. It's not a real plan, for many reasons. It's not surprising it took this long, and it's not surprising it's not real: even though the nominal military objectives Israel is pursuing in the Gaza Strip are obviously impossible to effectuate without some serious plan for "what comes after", any serious day after plan is a conceptual non-starter for the hard-right coalition keeping Bibi in power. So of course Bibi is going to tap dance around this issue and defer it as much as possible; a new iteration of the old "airstrikes while you wait" policy. While in theory Israel is blowing up Gaza to accomplish certain policy objectives -- from the short-term bringing the hostages home to the long-term securing of the Gaza/Israel border -- in practice Israel is blowing up Gaza because as long as it's doing that it can avoid thinking seriously about how to accomplish those objectives insofar as a serious grappling with said issues would require concessions that are ideologically unacceptable by the Israeli right -- for example, recognizing Palestinians' legitimate rights to self-determination. 

But tempting as it is, I'm not going to go on a rant regarding the inadequacies of this plan (though, to stress again, it's woefully inadequate and intentionally so). Rather, I want to focus in on one aspect of it -- the vague nod to some "local" Palestinian administrators and operatives who would implement these policies on the ground. The questions that immediately raised include "who exactly does Israel have in mind" and "what self-respecting Palestinian would agree to serve as the Israeli government's cat's paw?" My friend Layla referred to it as a proposed "quisling" regime, and in context that's difficult to argue against.

Yet I do think we need to unpack that issue a little more. One of the most unfair features of an eventual Israeli and Palestinian peace agreement is that it is going to have to be agreed to by people you hate. And by hate, I'm not referring to some sort of atavistic bigotry, I mean a hatred that has very real and justified foundations behind it. It's going to be agreed to by people who supported kidnapping Israeli kids on October 7. It's going to be agreed to by people who supported destroying Palestinian cultural heritage throughout the Gaza Strip. And that's going to be very difficult to deal with.

Consider the following statement: "If you find yourself agreeing with Hamas, stop and turn back, you're doing it wrong." Seems straightforward enough. And yet, any deal in the foreseeable future we might reach will be, quite literally, in part an agreement with Hamas. That's unavoidable (as Rabin famously observed: "You don't make peace with your friends."). And the problem is that where "agreeing with Hamas" is (understandably) taken as strong evidence that a position is a bad one, then necessarily every possible proposed deal will immediately become suspect the moment Hamas signals it might agree to it (i.e., it becomes an actual deal). It's a huge thumb on the scale in favor of rejectionism.

The same is true running in the reverse direction: a deal with Israel means a deal with Israel; by definition, the governmental structure that emerges in Gaza as part of that deal will be one that is at some level acceptable to Israel. Indeed, that's the hope of a good deal -- it's one that everyone will be happy or at least content with. But this very fact also means that any "deal" will be vulnerable to the charge that it represents capitulation to the hated Zionists -- the very fact that they find it agreeable proves it is a deal not worth taking. Again, to reiterate, I'm not accusing Layla of this -- in the context of this proposed "deal" the charges have very real legs. The point, though, is that this is an omnipresent phenomenon -- it stands ready to sabotage any agreement, insofar as agreeability from the wrong party can always be leveraged as proof that we're being taken for a ride.

I think this dilemma is what generates one of the great misguided fantasies that pervade discussion of Israel and Palestinian -- the belief that it is possible for one side ("my" side) to generate a solution and just impose it, without having to account for the other. Some "pro-Israel" writers imagine a sufficiently vanquished Palestinian people such that Israel can simply write the terms of the final arrangement and have it be accepted durably ever after; this fantasy is in many ways what motivated the plan Bibi just released. To the victors go the spoils and all that. And this also can be found in the "anti-normalization" kick amongst some "pro-Palestinian" activists: they affirmatively reject collaborationist peacebuilding initiatives with Israelis in favor of a fantastical future where practices of ostracization and coercion sufficiently squeeze the lifeforce out of Israel such that they can just decree the ultimate solution and Israelis will have no choice but to accede (or leave). 

In both cases, the fantasy is one where one can come to a "deal" without actually having to deal with the party that one hates. And while I can in concept understand the appeal of the fantasy, it is ultimately a fantasy. It can't be made real. Worse, it comes perilously close to suggesting that the way we know a deal is just is that the "bad" side hates it and has to be coerced into accepting it -- if they agree to it with any emotion other than miserable defeatism, then we're being exploited. That way lies disaster.

I've long been a fan of Amos Oz's observation that, on a national level, what Israelis and Palestinians need is a divorce, not a marriage. And the events of the past few months only reinforce that view. As distant as a just two-state solution may seem, a just one-state solution seems farther still. Given what Gaza's government did to Israelis on October 7, and what Israel's government is doing to Palestinians now, if you believe that there's a viable route to "and then both polities unite under a single political structure in the spirit of brotherhood and liberal tolerance, happily ever after", I'd say you're either hopelessly naive or you don't actually care about one faction's happily ever after at all (for casuals, it's typically the former; for more committed partisans, it's definitely the latter).

But that doesn't mean divorces are easy. While it might seem to be the most straightforward thing in the world -- just get two parties who hate each other to agree to separate from one another -- what makes some divorces impossibly acrimonious is when the participants decide that their dead giveaway for a "bad deal" is that their interlocutor finds it acceptable, and their lodestone guide for a "good deal" is that their counterparty despises it.

So I write this to prepare us all for the uncomfortable future we'll have to deal with if we want to see an actual deal (not a fiated decree by our righteously prevailing host). Making a deal will mean agreeing with people every bone in your body may say "it's a bad sign that I'm agreeing with them!" That challenge will always be on there by people who want to sabotage the deal. But it can't be enough. You don't make peace with your friends.

Learning the Right Wrong Lessons

The Biden administration's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan should be viewed as a milestone moment in political courage. Instead, as both Scott Lemieux and Kevin Drum observe, it's probably one of his biggest political millstones. How did this happen?

We need to be clear: Afghanistan had become a hopeless quagmire. As Lemieux puts it, we could stay "for six more months" in perpetuity and just slowly bleed more and more, or we could make a decision to leave. Eventually, someone would have to make the decision to leave, and the only question was who would rip off the band-aid. Three different presidents kicked that can down the road for someone else to deal with.

It was Biden who finally had the guts to step forward, and he did so knowing he'd take a hit. There was no way withdrawing from Afghanistan was going to be pretty. Losing rarely is. But in the scheme of things, the withdrawal went about as smoothly as reasonably possible. Again, "reasonably possible" -- losing isn't going to be pretty. But all the armchair generals in the world still haven't offered much alternatives aside from "stay for another six months, and another six months after that." See point one.

Biden should have earned praise for this call. Instead, he get hit with a brutal one-two punch -- one from the media, which positively excoriated him over the "chaotic" withdrawal; and then from the putatively anti-war left which gave him essentially no credit for the move and certainly showed zero interest in providing substantial political cover for it. Indeed, it is fair to say that the Afghanistan withdrawal was the negative turning point in Biden's poll numbers with the American people. Doing the right thing got him nothing with the left and got him scorn with the right.

It can be hard to predict political fallout -- my students are now young enough that I have to emphasize to them that the moral taken from Nader 2000 was absolutely not "Democrats learned that they can't take the left for granted!" -- but even the most dimwitted politician surely will understand what obvious lesson to draw from this story, and it's not a good one. Nice work, team.

Clown Cars Aren't For Driving, They're For Clowning

At the start of the congressional session, I predicted that "endless stunt investigations is all the House GOP will do, because it's all they can agree upon". I'll give myself a pat on the back for that one, as the House -- on its second try -- decided to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for absolutely no discernible reason.

It's dead-on-arrival in the Senate, and rightfully so, but we need to reiterate just how pathetic and embarrassing this was. It was embarrassing when it failed the first time, and it's embarrassing that it succeeded the second time. The nominal complaint -- that Mayorkas isn't enforcing border policy to Republicans liking -- is not only not an impeachable offense (except insofar as Republicans believe it's unconstitutional for them to lose elections, which appears to be increasingly their consensus view), but it's doubly-embarrassing to blame Mayorkas for inaction on the border given that congressional Republicans can't even pass their own bill on the border because they think doing so will help Biden in the next election (and because actual policymaking, unlike endless stunt investigations, requires actual position-taking). Republicans dealing with the fact that they are too chaotic and incompetent to even have, let alone enact, an agenda on the issue they say is a Crisis Invasion Destroying America!!1!!1! by impeaching a Democrat is the latest example of the crippling infantilization that has completely overtaken the party.

The fiasco did give me a chance to call my Republican congressional representative, Lori Chavez-Deremer (R-OR), and Be Mad At Her, but to by honest my heart wasn't fully in it this time. I genuinely don't understand why Chavez-Deremer even wants to be in Congress at this point. She's not doing anything there -- she's certainly not legislating -- she just mindlessly nods along with whatever ridiculous circus show her more creative MAGA colleagues decide to put forward in any given week. One would think she could do the same thing much more remuneratively as a talk radio host, and with any luck after the next election she'll get that opportunity. 

[Image: NYT]

Blamed for Surviving

A new book tells the gripping story about a Polish Jew and brilliant mathematician who, during the Holocaust, pretended to be a member of the Polish nobility to survive the Nazi occupation. Janina Spinner Mehlberg's deception actually ran two layers deep: she worked for a Polish welfare organization during the war, while secretly being a member of the Polish Underground -- but in the Polish Underground, she maintained her cover as a Catholic "Countess" in order to hide her Jewish identity from her fellow resistors.

There's much that could be said about this story, not the least the lengthy period where publishers ignored it out of a general disinterest in hearing survivor narratives. But I want to focus on something slightly different. 

In her "public" role during the war, Mehlberg regularly worked with the Nazi occupiers, negotiating for more food or resources to enter the work camps by arguing that it would serve the interests of the German war machine (non-starving workers could replace German men sent to the front, for instance). Even this at best indirectly benefited Jewish inmates, who were typically slated for direct extermination -- the hope was that some of these provisions would end up reaching the entirety of the camps and so improve the survivability for Jews as well as ethnic Poles.

Mehlberg, in short, may not have saved any Jews at all. And her "arguments" were ones expressly framed around aiding the Nazi's military ambitions. Yet I cannot imagine anyone reading her story and not thinking she acting bravely and heroically.

This is why, whenever I see some soulless cretin on the internet running the "Zionists collaborated with Nazis" narrative, with a smirk and a sanctimonious "see how evil they are and always have been!", I positively radiate with fury. In the most horrifying circumstances imaginable, yes, Jews were forced to negotiate with Nazis -- and negotiate from positions of weakness and supplication. The "deals" we got obviously were not good ones, but that didn't make them any less necessary. To treat this as cowardice or betrayal is not just to miss the point, it is to act with an almost impossible cruelty towards the survivors and the Jewish community writ large placed in truly impossible circumstances. It blames survivors for surviving, and trying to help others survive as well. Even if I thought, with the benefit of hindsight and comfortable distance, that the deals were objectively "bad" (and I make no such claim), I would still never dare indict those who made them. I cannot imagine having the hubris or the heartlessness to do otherwise.

I do not judge Mehlberg for doing what it took to survive. I do not judge her for trying her best, in the best way she could, to save innocent lives. It was not her who placed her in those circumstances. Anyone who tries to make her, or those in analogous circumstances, into a villain, is beneath contempt.

Super Birthday

It's a big day today -- it's my birthday! We're having a bunch of friends over to our house to celebrate my birthday and for no other reason (there may some light entertainment on in the background).

I saw a comic describe herself as in her "early-mid-to-late-thirties", and boy is that a mood.

Hope you all have a wonderful day, however you spend it. And may 2024 be a peaceful, productive, just, and thriving year for all.

Australian Police: They Were Saying "Boo-Urns"

One of the more shocking incidents witnessed in anti-Israel protests that occurred immediately following Hamas' October 7 attack was the allegation that marchers in Sydney chanted "gas the Jews". But while several witnesses testified to hearing the chant, local police have now determined that they do not believe those were the words that were spoken.

Now, before I tell you what the police concluded was the chant actually deployed that day, I want to share a couple of reactions to this finding:

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils called for prosecutions of those who disseminated "false claims" that had unfairly vilified Palestinians and Muslims and harmed the "delicate fabric" of social cohesion.

[....] 

Protest organiser Palestine Action Group, which long maintained the "gas" chant was never uttered, called for widespread media retractions. 

Spokesman Josh Lees suggested the wrongly captioned video was designed to damage the movement, pointing to "a long history of false claims of anti-Semitism used to silence critics of the state of Israel".

Strong stuff! Now here's what the police concluded was being chanted:

They "concluded with overwhelming certainty that the words used were, 'Where's the Jews?'" Deputy Commissioner Mal Lanyon said on Friday.

Ohhhh. It was only "where's the Jews?"! I can see why the organizers are demanding an apology -- it's getting to the point where an angry mob can't demand to know where the Jews are without someone saying that's antisemitic (rolls eyes). The only offensive thing I see here is the poor grammar!

For what it's worth, the umbrella Australian Jewish Association stands by its initial conclusion that the chant was indeed "gas the Jews."

"I Dressed Like a Crazy Pharoah for You, Man!" (Azerbaijan Edition)

Azerbaijan is holding a Potemkin presidential election tomorrow. But what makes this one especially outstanding is that not only did the authoritarian incumbent put a bunch of fake "opposition" parties on the ballot, he's also having them release deliberately idiotic policy proposals so he looks better by comparison (h/t).

The "opposition" candidates have brought some color to the election campaign by mooting a number of unlikely policy proposals: renaming the country the North Azerbaijan Republic, a nod to nationalist discourse that dreams of a greater Azerbaijan, including the ethnic Azerbaijani minority regions of Iran; formally claiming Armenia's Syunik Province as Azerbaijani; or sending Azerbaijani troops to support Russian forces in Syria.

"They want to talk about all these stupid ideas in order to show that Aliyev is better [and] that these are the only alternatives," Open Azerbaijan's [Zohrab] Ismayil said.

 Wasn't this a plotline on Community?

The presidential "debate" was equally farcical:

At a debate held before Azerbaijan's February 7 presidential election, the viewer could be forgiven for not being sure who was supporting the incumbent and who represented the opposition.

"President Ilham Aliyev has kept his word and fulfilled every promise he has made," said one candidate, Fuad Aliyev (no relation to the president), at the January 15 public television debate. Another candidate, Zahid Oruc, argued that great Azerbaijani statesmen throughout history would all have voted for Aliyev.

The president himself did not appear at the debate but sent an emissary, Tahir Budagov, to absorb some of the flattery.

"Dear Mr. Tahir, do you know the strengths of the candidate you represent?" Razi Nurullayev, the head of the National Front Party, asked Budagov. "For years, our party has stated that we will liberate Karabakh and restore the integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan, but your candidate has done it," Nurullayev said, referring to Azerbaijan's recapture of the ethnic Armenian-dominated region of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023.

One almost has to respect the commitment to bootlicking. Almost. 

You will not be surprised to learn that genuine opposition parties are boycotting the election entirely.

They're Talking About Us

In the latest effort to keep the reward loop for bad faith grandstanding on campus speech and antisemitism churning, right-wing actors are targeting prominent Jewish History professor Derek Penslar, who was tapped to co-chair* Harvard's recently announced taskforce on antisemitism.

I joined many of my colleagues who work in the arena of antisemitism and/or Israel or Jewish Studies in defending Penslar from these attacks. It's not because I necessarily agree with everything Penslar ever wrote (a statement I could make about anyone). Rather, it's because of the obvious true target here, for which Penslar was only a symbol: the broad swath of liberal Jews who are not wild-eyed anti-Zionists, who are not committed to the view that Israel's only role in the world is as demonspawn, but are clear-eyed about its flaws, insistent that the occupation is intolerable, and vocal that the trajectory Israel is on needs to change. For people like us, I think we can borrow from Frantz Fanon's philosophy teacher: "When you hear someone insulting Derek Penslar pay attention; he is talking about you." 

Consider this piece by David Mikics in Tablet, which, while graciously conceding that Penslar is not himself antisemitic, pushes the thesis that Penslar is motivated by making the world safe for people who are.

As a member of the Nexus Task Force, [Penslar] is in fact one of the key academic activists leading the effort to sanction a wide range of anti-Zionist speech and teachings. (The Jewish studies petition defending Penslar’s appointment was organized by Nexus.) Officially, Jonathan Jacoby, the incoming director of Nexus, says that he doesn’t want to erase the IHRA, just supplement it. But evidence suggests that Nexus is already lobbying lawmakers to absolve anti-Zionists from any taint of antisemitism. Nexus recently hired Kevin Rachlin, formerly of J Street, to lead its D.C. office—a hire that suggests Nexus’ origins in the world of the Democratic Party’s top-down campaigns to reconcile its “big donors” with some of the party’s more hateful constituencies.

Again, I appreciate the acknowledgment that Nexus is not "officially" pushing to erase IHRA. But of course we're lying. And how do you know we're lying? Not because of a critical analysis of Nexus' actual offering on antisemitism -- no no no. It's because we're tied to J Street, of course -- and J Street, in turn, is naught but an effort to launder radical anti-Zionist hate into the Democratic mainstream (that this piece came out right at the same time as J Street took its most overt step yet towards reconsolidating towards the Democratic Party center is *chef's kiss*).

But this is the point: trying to nitpick around this or that passage from Penslar's work is missing the broader game. If you're a Jew who's sympathetic to Nexus, if you're a Jew who aligns with J Street, if you're a Jew who thinks that there's sadly purchase to calling the situation in the West Bank "apartheid" -- if you fall into any of these categories, all the insults being lobbed toward Derek Penslar are talking about you. That's the reality of the situation, and we need to pay attention to what's actually happening here.

* The other co-chair is Raffaella Sadun, a professor at Harvard's Business School. It's interesting we've heard essentially nothing about her even as Penslar's every jot and tittle is being scrutinized to death. As best I can tell Sadun's research has nothing to do with Jews or antisemitism; there's little doubt that Penslar is, along traditional dimensions, a much more natural choice to lead this committee. 

To be clear, I don't think that makes Sadun an inappropriate choice to co-chair the committee. Leaving aside the possibility that she's deeply involved in these issues in her non-professional time, I actually think it's probably a good thing to have "lay" representation on these panels -- understanding how antisemitism effects persons who are not stewing in the hot house of Jewish or Israel Studies 24/7. For my part, the Jewish students who've expressed to me the most anxiety over the past few months are the ones who do not self-identify as particularly "involved" Jews -- they're buffeted by cross-winds of being confused and scared and uncertain if they have standing to be confused and/or scared. That isn't to say Sadun falls into that category either; only that a picture of Jewish life at Harvard which only considers the view of the Jews who are most tied into traditionally "Jewish" practices, organizations, or issues would be an incomplete picture.

Birthday Month Roundup

It's February, which is Black History Month, or as it's better known around some parts, "Why Isn't There a White History Month" Month. It's also my birthday month! To celebrate the august occasion, here's a roundup!

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The Biden administration announces sanctions against named Israelis implicated in radical settler violence. And while it starts with four people, it lays the foundation for much more sweeping action. People say Tom Friedman is the Biden administration's external "whisper", but maybe he's listening to me?

Speaking of Friedman, I'd love it if his proposed "Biden doctrine" became a reality. It might be wishcasting, but then, it might not (see, e.g., the above entry).

A very interesting conversation between Joshua Leifer and some Israeli leftists, including Standing Together's Sally Abed (and credit where it's due on the hat tip). I particularly appreciate Abed completing a circle that often is left unconnected: "Palestinian liberation necessitates Jewish safety, and vice versa. And I say it to both sides. You’re pro-Israel? You need to liberate Palestinians. You’re pro-Palestinian? You need to talk about Jewish safety." As another conversant observed, it's very obvious "that Hamas went for everyone—that they weren’t just trying to kill Jews," and that acknowledgment is part of -- not a distraction from -- their calls for a ceasefire.

And speaking of Standing Together, the BDS movement is currently targeting them for a boycott as a "normalizing" op. For the most part, this smacks of jealousy -- Standing Together has been getting a bunch of good press as the first significant Israeli organization actively calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (while also stressing the importance of returning Israeli hostages), and if there's one thing BDS activists cannot abide, it's the notion that Israelis are valid contributors to the creation of a just future for Israelis and Palestinians. In my endless search for silver linings, however, I will say that probably the fastest way for Standing Together to gain credibility with more centrist-y Israeli and diaspora Jews is to be publicly hated by BDS. Great heroes need great villains, after all.

I'm on the record as supporting the right and utility of judges offering their extra-legal "moral" opinion on issues that come before them, so long as this opinion does not displace the formal legal analysis. Opinions like, say, Justice Stewart's in Griswold, which both characterized Connecticut's anti-contraception law as "uncommonly silly" (a moral judgment) while nonetheless concluding it was constitutionally permitted (a legal judgment) are valuable contributors to public conversation. On that note, Judge Jeffrey White's just-released opinion dismissing on political question grounds a claim that the Biden administration's support for Israel is violating its duties under the Genocide Convention (a ruling which is I think indisputably correct on the law), while also making evident his personal sympathy with the plaintiff's substantive arguments, is -- regardless of whether one agrees with said moral judgment -- exactly how opinions like this should go. Some judges on the Northern District of Texas would do well to take notes. (For what it's worth, Judge White is a George W. Bush appointee and now a senior judge in the Northern District of California).

Oregon Republicans in the state legislature have a tendency of just refusing to show up to work to sabotage our state's legislative agenda. Oregon voters got tired of it and passed a constitutional amendment barring legislators from running for reelection if they miss too many session. Oregon Republicans kept doing it. And now those Oregon Republicans are barred from running for reelection.

J Street's Post-Bowman Reconsolidation

The Forward reports that J Street has dropped its endorsement of Jamaal Bowman after concluding that his recent rhetorical framings and practices around Israel (regular "genocide" charges; meeting with Norman Finkelstein) "crossed the line" and simply diverged too far from what the liberal lobby group was willing to accept. Bowman faces a challenging primary fight against Westchester County Executive George Latimer.

It seems like just yesterday that I was gaming out the fallout from Bowman's contretemps with the DSA over him being perceived as too close to Israel ("too close", here, meant "visiting it with J Street" and "voting for Iron Dome funding"). How the world turns.

But I don't actually have much to say on this development. The one observation I will make is that this is, I think the symbolic starting gun for a new political reality for J Street where it's going to face elected adversaries to its left.

Obviously, given where it positioned itself on the Israel spectrum, J Street has from its inception faced a pinch on either side -- AIPAC-y sorts attacking it from the right, JVPers from the left. But for most of its existence it has been somewhat insulated from the left flank attacks insofar as J Street is primarily a political lobby and left-ward critics of its positioned had little in the way of presence amongst elected officials. Because of that, J Street's strategy was basically to try to consolidate the progressive electorate starting at the most liberal Democrat (whom it basically took for granted as a J Street sympathizer) and then moving progressively towards the center of the party, where the actual battles would be fought. The abortive endorsement of Rashida Tlaib was part of this -- it couldn't really fathom that amongst elected Democrats there might be anyone who'd be a poor fit by virtue of being too left-wing or pro-Palestinian, even as it quickly became clear that Tlaib had genuine and material differences in policy orientation over Israel than what J Street was pushing.

Tlaib may have for a while been viewed as an anomaly, but as any good Kuhnian can tell you enough anomalies eventually compels a paradigm shift, and so too here. I observed back in 2022 that AIPAC's victories in Democratic primaries against more J Street aligned candidates perhaps counterintuitively would increase the appeal of more radical left positions on Israel amongst progressive Democrats (read that post for the logic), and while I think the shift we're seeing here is determined by a lot more than that, it goes to the point that J Street is acknowledging here a new era where there will be elected Democrats who are not mission-aligned with J Street from the left as well as the right, and it's doing so from a position of at least some vulnerability. This is a new world for J Street, and it has to figure out how to reconsolidate a base of support in the midst of a move from, functionally, being one pole of a (within the Democratic Party) bipolar struggle with AIPAC to sitting in the mushy middle taking flak from either side.

This doesn't mean that J Street lacks a constituency amongst Democrats -- there are I think still plenty of Democrats in the liberal two-state bucket -- but consolidating them is maybe a little less straightforward than it was when they had the left edge of the elected-branch of the party basically locked down. It will be an adjustment, and it'll be interesting to see how J Street adapts to it. There are ways to do this -- even ways to do this that can yield greater successes (e.g., by a "good cop/bad cop" play where they suddenly look a lot more attractive compared to the wolves lurking just over the horizon) -- but at the very least, J Street is going to need to develop some set of tactics for dealing with more left-wing rivals who it has to this point largely been able to ignore in the political realm. 

How Should the Single-Issue Palestine Voter Vote?

One of the bigger political stories to cross my path the past week was the report that a planned meeting between Biden campaign surrogates and Arab and Muslim community leaders in Michigan was canceled due to local furor at Joe Biden's support for Israel during the current war in Gaza. It was a punctuation mark on evidence that Muslim and Arab voters are seriously considering, if not outright committed to, withholding their votes from Joe Biden come November -- a decision that could have serious electoral ramifications in a swing state like Michigan.

Some Democratic commentators have clearly been surprised at the scope and severity of this reaction. But their surprise, I think, stems a fundamental misunderstanding of how closely -- or not -- the Arab and Muslim community was tied to the Democratic Party in the first place. These ties were much, much shallower than it appeared; a shallowness that was masked by the seeming impossibility of Muslims voting Republican in the post-9/11 and especially Trumpist era of extreme GOP Islamophobia. But much like with Latinos, Democratic strategists confused a negative polarization story for deeper partisan loyalty. 

Before 9/11, Arabs and Muslims were considered a swingy, even potentially right-leaning, voting bloc. Those sentiments still have plenty of purchase, and for persons who hold them it's hardly unfathomable to not pull the lever for a Democrat. And while for White people, "I'm so mad at Biden about Palestine that I won't vote for him" is almost certainly a phenomenon overwhelmingly associated with the leftier edge of the progressive coalition, that almost certainly is not the case amongst Muslim and Arab voters, for whom strong support for Palestine is -- if not quite wall-to-wall -- something that very much crosses ideological borders. If you envision that centrist or even conservative Muslim who nonetheless voted Democrat in the last few elections for no other reason than the relatively straightforward rationale of "Republicans hate us", it wouldn't necessarily take that much for them to decide to drop Biden or even vote GOP if their furor at Biden's Israel policy grows intense enough.

On that note, Matthew Petti has a fascinating and thoughtful piece on how we might expect Muslim-American conservatism to affect partisan politics in the coming years. He runs through several possibilities, from "Muslim conservatives will perform right-wing pro-Israel bona fides" (something we've definitely seen in recent years) to "the GOP will grow significantly more open to pro-Palestinian politics". The latter possibility has been largely masked because of the degree to which the GOP has defined itself by extreme chest-thumping pro-Israel politics. But while it may not be the most likely outcome, at least in the near-term, there are burblings that might give hope or fear (depending on your point of view). The true nationalist-conservative MAGA base absolutely contains significant elements that (for the usual unsavory reasons) are absolutely prepared if not eager to jettison support for Israel and instead cast Israel and Zionism as enemies of the American volk. While these views aren't common amongst elected Republicans, they aren't utterly unheard of either -- as in Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)'s social media post pitting "American patriotism" against "Zionism". And while much has been written about young liberals turning against Israel, there's also evidence of similar ebbing of support amongst young conservatives -- both amongst the nationalist right and amongst evangelicals -- a trend which offers rare opportunities for the GOP to fight in a demographic they sorely want to make inroads with. Back in 2021 I floated the possibility -- unlikely, but not absolutely impossible to imagine -- of Trump turning against Israel in 2024 (remember the "fuck him!" heard 'round the world?); if that happened, it could really crack some coalitions wide open. At the very least, Trump's mercurial enough to do it, and the GOP base is slavish enough to follow along with it.

Given all that, I've been wondering: what should the pure single-issue pro-Palestine voter do in 2024? By single-issue voter, I mean someone for whom the sole and decisive basis upon which they'll cast their vote is the issue of Palestine. While for most people that's an oversimplification of their decisionmaking process, it might not be for everyone, and it in practice might also roughly capture a classic "centrist" or "independent" voter for whom all the other issues that might push one towards Biden or Trump (abortion rights, democracy, health care, whatever) basically wash out, such that Palestine becomes the decisive issue.

To that person, the Biden 2024 pitch has been pretty straightforward: If the only thing you care about is Palestine, Trump would be worse on Palestine. No matter how angry you are at Biden, he's still the lesser of two evils on this issue.

Of course, some people aren't willing to vote for the lesser of two evils. But let's leave even that cadre aside. One can absolutely imagine arguments contesting the premise -- is Biden actually a lesser evil? Obviously, if Trump makes the pivot against Israel discussed above, that would sharply contest the premise. If that possibility seems unlikely, there's also the argument that Trump and Biden are equivalently evil -- their positions are materially identical. Even if, by stipulation, Trump's rhetoric might be worse and more cheerleader-y of Israel's worst excesses, it might be that such additional "support" makes no marginal difference at the level of policy. If one thinks that Israel already is maxing out the brutality it can impose upon the Palestinian population, then Trump being "more" pro-Israel is superfluous -- it doesn't make a difference. In such a world, how one votes in 2024 will make no difference on the level of policy except to the extent that it signals that the pro-Palestine voting bloc is a force that needs to be reckoned with going forward. So what vote -- Biden, Trump, or neither -- would send that signal most strongly? That's not self-evident -- there's cases to be made for all three. But while, contrary to many loud internet folks, I don't think the case for "vote neither" is self-evident (leftists "voting neither" in 2000, far from generating the lesson "we are indispensable", instead led to widespread hatred for the left from normcore liberals that took almost two decades to work past), it's absolutely not implausible either.

And this argument extends even if one does agree that Trump would be materially worse for Palestinians if elected to office in 2024, because then the question is whether the marginal difference in Trump's badness -- which we can ruthlessly measure in "number of additional Palestinian lives taken or ruined" -- is worth the possible advantage of cracking historic bipartisan pro-Israel consensus and opening the door for a more robust, genuine pro-Palestinian position to take root in at least one of the two parties going forward. If it seems horribly cruel to sacrifice Palestinian lives in the short-term for sake of a political long game, you might be right; but calculations like that are sadly omnipresent in this space. In a much more brutal sense, this was after all Hamas' calculation behind the 10/7 attack -- the goal was to provoke a bruising Israeli military response that would lead to the loss of innumerable Palestinian lives and, in doing so, fixate the world's gaze in a way that would lead to long-term, durable shift in global attitudes towards Israel on the one hand and the Palestinian cause on the other -- a calculation which has proven to be successful beyond their wildest estimations (this is one reason why Hamas has -- contrary to the assumptions of some of its more gullible western supporters -- not demonstrated itself to be especially interested in a ceasefire; to some extent, it's happy for the war to continue because it's proven itself eager to sacrifice Palestinian lives in exchange for global sympathy, and doesn't want that trade route to be closed).

Note, once again, that this chain of logic only holds if one truly is a single-issue voter. The logic falls apart once one starts adding in all the additional bads of not voting for Biden (abortion rights, health care, death of democracy, and so on). At that point, to adopt the above chain of logic is to say "the possibility of cracking the historic bipartisan consensus over Israel come 2028 is worth seeing (among other things) women thrown in jail for miscarriages, trans status being criminalized, LGBTQ books banned in schools, and potentially permanent damage to the basic status of the country as a democracy." To be a single-issue voter (on Palestine or anything else) sells all those other issues out, and that choice does and should in my view be judged exceptionally harshly. Put differently, the decision to not vote for Biden in 2024, no matter why one does it, is a decision to abandon the people and values that would be devastated by a Trump victory -- anyone who does this absolutely should be said to not care about reproductive freedom or democratic robustness or reining in the extreme right judicial branch or any of the other issues of pressing importance whose futures are on the ballot in 2024. 

But the moral jeremiad aside, it's undeniable that caring about absolutely nothing but a single issue -- any issue -- gives one a sort of tactical flexibility that others don't have. And for a person who is genuinely in that state of mind, it's not actually that clear what the choice in 2024 should be.

Penn in Paper

Penn Gillette, the vocal half of the magical duo Penn & Teller, has a very interesting and thoughtful interview in Cracked that I enjoyed reading. It initially crossed my path when folks noted his apparent repudiation of his long-standing identity as a libertarian, which included this banger of a line:

I completely have not used the word Libertarian in describing myself since I got an email during lockdown where a person from a Libertarian organization wrote to me and said, “We’re doing an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas, and obviously we’d like you to head it.” I looked at that email and I went, “The fact they sent me this email is something I need to be very ashamed of, and I need to change.” Now, you can make the argument that maybe you don’t need to mandate masks — you can make the argument that maybe that shouldn’t be the government's job — but you cannot make the argument that you shouldn’t wear masks. It is the exact reciprocal of seatbelts because if I don’t wear a seatbelt, my chances of fucking myself up increase — if I don’t wear a mask, the chance of fucking someone else up increase. 

Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.

But Penn also had some interesting comments when asked about Jews, Israel, and Palestine. At first, what he started to say made me a bit squirmy -- he indicated he didn't really understand the notion of being "culturally Jewish", and clearly thought it was a bit absurd. But he righted ship in the next question, when the interviewer asked "Because of the Israel-Hamas war, even talking about this can bring up accusations that, by being critical of Judaism[!!!] or Israel, it’s almost automatically anti-Semitism. Are you nervous talking about this?" Now, as you probably know, whenever I hear this "almost automatically antisemitic" claim, my blood pressure almost automatically spikes. But here I thought Penn said something very thoughtful in reply:

Yes, I’m very nervous. But I want to be a little more high-minded. I’m not as nervous about being attacked for it as I am nervous about being wrong. As a good friend of mine said, “I don’t mind being called an asshole — I don’t want to be an asshole.” (Laughs)

I've promised myself over and over again that I won’t say, publicly, even to friends, anything about what’s happening in Israel because it is far beyond me. I have no understanding of what it feels like for an organized group to come into where I’m living and kill people that I know — I’ve never experienced that, so, “Shut up.” And, yet, to live in the world, we have to contemplate that a little bit.

At the outset, I'm thrilled that Penn takes exactly the right line -- there's no entitlement not to be called an asshole ((or an antisemite)or an antisemite) when there's a colorable case that you're being one, and it's the latter prospect that one should worry about. Kudos to Penn for resisting this incredibly popular "anti-anti-racist" framing.

More broadly, someone -- I forget who -- said that one of the more pernicious features of current discursive climates on campuses is the immense pressure to declare an opinion, regardless of whether one feels confident enough in one's own knowledge to commit to one. "Silence is complicity" and all that; but it means that there is very little space for people to just step back and say "I don't know, I'm still learning about this, and I'm not going to be dragooned into a position before I'm ready to take one." The person who said this was talking about students in college, but I think the trend is more general than that, and again, I think Penn is quite right to resist it even as he notes (also correctly) that this forbearance is not stopping (and should not stop) him from thinking on the subject. As someone who thinks that one of the keystones of epistemic antisemitism is a perceived entitlement to talk about Jews without really knowing about Jews, I again view Penn's behavior here as a welcome form of epistemic humility.

So yes -- a good, thoughtful interview. I encourage folks to read it. It's a good example of someone who I think is committing himself to some important epistemic virtues even as he is clearly still, in my view, working through some thoughts.

The Point of Hamas' "Narrative"

Hamas has released a slickly produced document providing a belated "narrative" of what happened on October 7. I link to it for reference, even though it's sickening reading for anyone with the slightest sense of justice or empathy for Israelis. 

It's quite obvious that this is written for a particular western audience and that Hamas knows how to write for that audience; it echoes many of the apologias one hears from its foreign sympathizers seeking to excuse its atrocities. Some of these are inserted in almost on reflex -- for example, in a section asserting that only military sites were targeted, the authors write that "the Palestinian fighters were keen to avoid harming civilians despite the fact that the resistance does not possess precise weapons." The lack of "precise weapons" is a line typically used in reference to Hamas' use of indiscriminate rocket fire, but it obviously has no bearing on the sort of close-quarters, ground operation that occurred on October 7 (Hamas' machine guns and grenades are more or less as "precise" as anyone else's machine guns and grenades; "imprecision" was not the problem here). But that follows from the overall tenor of the piece, which is to align Hamas' narrative with the way its most credulous apologists speak about Hamas -- to further bind these groups together as "all on the same side."

That said, for the most part this document should be read as an official extension of the 10/7 denialism that the Washington Post reported on the other day: that 10/7 essentially "didn't happen" (the targets were military, any civilians killed were either targeted accidentally or were actually murdered by Israelis, reports of atrocities like rape are propagandist fabrications, and so on).

What's the point of a document like this? There are several:

First, it is piggybacking on the aforementioned denialist movement that was from the get-go primed to accept any possible narrative of Israeli perfidy. This tendency exists on a continuum, but even "soft-core denialists" who are primarily invested in viewing some of the more heart-wrenching charges (mass rapes, slaughtered infants) as exaggerated or fictious will treat Hamas' document as moving the Overton Window further. Certainly, the useful idiots who promote this sort of view didn't need Hamas to give them this document, but they will be encouraged by it and will hungrily consume it and use it to fuel further excretions.

Second, it is attempting to rewrite history. Everyone and their mother has congratulated themselves for the "realization" that Hamas' goal on 10/7 was to commit an attack of sufficient brutality so as to compel a bruising Israeli response that would wreck Israel's reputation and bolster the profile of the Palestinian cause. Having succeeded in generating such a response, it only makes sense to try and erase the initial provocation. If October 7 essentially "didn't happen", then everything that happened after October 7 is simply random unmitigated acts of Israeli aggression -- no longer "backlash", now just "lash".

Third, it is a form of "I know you are but what am I" trolling. At various points, the document characterizes Hamas' operation as an "arrest" mission ("Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 ... sought to arrest the enemy’s soldiers"). Here I actually don't think the goal is directly to rewrite history, because (though lord knows where this optimism comes from) I don't think even Hamas' most credulous dupes could possibly believe October 7 was actually an arrest operation. Rather, here the very absurdism is the point -- the goal is not to make anyone believe something as absurd as October 7 being an attempt at effectuating arrests, it's to make people associate claims about effectuating arrests with absurdist propaganda.

We're all familiar with the Sartre line about how antisemites "like to play with discourse" while aware of the "absurdity" of their arguments. and that's what we're seeing here. Israel does engage in genuine arrest operations on a regular basis. By "genuine", I don't mean that these operations are not or cannot be abusive, legally dubious, violent, unethical, etc.. But that doesn't mean the label of "arrest" operation is an absurd one; it's an accurate characterization of the operation (even if it is an abusive arrest, a legally dubious arrest, a violent arrest, and so on). Hamas' goal, though, is to render that word something absurd; the sort of thing we all know is just a euphemism for lawless authoritarian abuse. Think of a term like "re-education" -- when we hear a government say that a given political dissident was "re-educated", we go beyond viewing it with a skeptical eye ("was this an abusive form of education?"). We don't view it literally at all -- we understand that "re-education" is just a term authoritarians use to bowdlerize taking dissidents into a warehouse and beating them until they recant. "Re-education" isn't (sometimes, often, even always) "done abusively", "re-education" isn't done at all. The goal here is to make "arrest" be treated similarly -- an absurd term that Israel and Hamas use in obviously non-literal fashion to describe periodically raiding the territory of the other and killing people in it.

And finally, we should not overlook that this document is a means for Hamas to retraumatize its victims. There is power and sadistic pleasure in not just inflicting hurt, but also then being able to stand impassively (or -- perhaps even better -- with the most subtle of smirks) and declare that nothing actually happened, that the victim is making it all up. That, alone, would suffice as a motivator -- a psychological insult on top of injury. The forced photographs of captives "smiling" -- cited in the document as proof of Hamas' gentle hands -- are of course part of this play; a means through which victims are coerced into serving as testifiers against themselves.

A Palestinian friend of mine, responding to the article about increased 10/7 denialism, reposted comments by former Palestinian Israeli MK who observed that Palestinians are "not good people that only do good things." "Victims of the occupation aren't good people, they're victims. They are not righteous, they have a just cause." The cause of ending the occupation is just, but this does not mean that all persons under occupation -- or even all those who purport to act under the banner of "ending occupation" -- behave righteously (any more than the justness of the cause of Jewish self-determination means that all those who act under that banner behavior righteously). It is no adjunct to opposing the occupation that one must believe Hamas incapable of the horrific acts of violence and sadism that the evidence overwhelmingly documents occurred exactly as alleged, and to spread Hamas' lies on this front is not "solidarity" but sadism. The fellow travelers here -- for example, Mondoweiss, which was highlighted for the particularly vicious denial of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas fighters -- should be called exactly what they are.

Can a Bibi-Led Israel Get to "Yes" on a Ceasefire?

A recurrent theme I've been hitting regarding calls for a "ceasefire" is that the term is meaningless without explication of the ceasefire's conditions. Everybody is fine with a ceasefire under certain conditions; the disagreement is regarding what those conditions should be. This, after all, is the basis for the obviously smarmy "Hamas could just surrender" take as a mechanism for ending hostilities -- it would cease the fire if "agreed" to, it just isn't a proposal that actually will be agreed to.  

Going off that insight, I've sometimes wondered why various Jewish groups -- or the U.S., for that matter -- haven't gone on offense a little bit in terms of proposing their own "ceasefire" plans whose conditions are agreeable. In general, any ceasefire proposal competes against whatever the belligerent parties think they can obtain from continuing military action, minus the costs of continuing military action. "Hamas could just surrender" may be a bit too brazen, but there are absolutely possible ceasefire conditions that wouldn't be quite so obvious non-starters that nonetheless could and should be viewed as substantial victories for Israel.

A ceasefire proposal based on immediate return of all hostages would be an obvious place to start. It could be paired with some other goodies -- Hamas' leadership agrees to go into exile into another country; proceedings against Israel at the ICJ are dropped. Submit that to the UN Security Council and make other countries vote against it. Make the other side be the one to say "yes, we might have said 'ceasefire now!', but not like this ...." The fact is, after all, that both Israel and Hamas have found themselves in the position of rejecting certain ceasefire proposals, but in the war of public opinion it would seem advisable for Israel and its allies to be seen as authoring proposals for peace rather than nixing them.

There are undoubtedly a multitude of reasons why this is too clever by half. But I think there is one specific, uncomfortable reason why we haven't seen Jewish groups pushing a line like this -- putting forward "ceasefire" conditions or urging the Biden administration to do the same. Simply put: they're worried that Israel would reject even a good, "reasonable" ceasefire proposal. And if that happens, after the Jewish groups endorsed the parameters, they'd have boxed themselves into the awkward position of positioning Israel as the obstacle to a just peace.

Several years ago, I broached the generic version of this worry in discussing the possibility -- unthinkable, in the Jewish world -- that contemporary, Bibi-era Israel might not be willing to agree to a "fair" peace agreement with the Palestinians. And at the moment, this worry is more than generic. Consider how Tom Friedman described the situation the other day in a conversation with Ezra Klein:

Netanyahu, I would argue, Ezra, doesn’t want to win. He wants to be winning, OK, that is, he wants to be able to say, we’re winning. We’re winning. We’re winning. It’s just around the corner. But he doesn’t want to actually win because, if the war actually ends, two things are going to happen. Then he can no longer avoid what is the new political end state. And I believe there will be an eruption, a massive eruption, of Israeli anger at him that I hope and pray will drive him from power because I believe he is not only the worst leader in Israel’s history. I believe he’s the worst leader in Jewish history.

And that’s a long history. And what is Netanyahu’s calculation? It’s very simple. If he is not in power and has to face the conclusion of his trial and three corruption charges without the protection and influence that comes over the judiciary from being in power, he has a very good chance of going to jail. People forget. Israel jailed a president and a former prime minister. They’re not afraid to do that. And he does not want to go to jail. And he does not want to give up power.

And so this is a terrible situation where Israel is in a existential war, and its prime minister has basically dual loyalties, one to the state and one to himself. And at every turn, he is prioritizing himself.

Put differently, where one takes Israel's goals to be things like "bringing the hostages home" or "destroying Hamas", one can at least understand opposing a ceasefire proposal to the extent that such a proposal will not lead to those outcomes (whilst continuing hostilities might). But the corollary to that is that if one believes those are Israel's goals, then a ceasefire proposal that does effectively accomplish them would be agreed to be Israel. And the corollary to that is that if Israel does not agree to such a proposal, it pretty decisively falsifies that these are the real goals. In short: making the proposal really puts that belief to the test, and no matter what they aver publicly I don't think most Jewish organizations are confident that this bet would pay out.

In a recent social media thread, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), alluded to this point. The cause of bringing home the hostages and incapacitating Hamas is indubitably just. But Bibi has not been comporting himself as if these are his primary goals. He's been acting in a fashion that suggests that his main goals are dragging this war on indefinitely to prolong his moment of political reckoning and appeasing his ultra-right coalition mates. And those objectives are absolutely not worth opposing a ceasefire for.

It is possible -- and proper -- for the United States to put this to the proof: if Israel wants to continue to receive American military backing, it has to show its objectives are what they say they are, rather than a self-centered way for Bibi to save his own skin while permanently kneecapping the political and social viability of Palestinian nationhood. If Bibi decides that the latter is more important than maintaining American support, well, that's his call to make (until the next election anyway), and the rest of the world in turn can make any number of justified inferences from those revealed preferences.

No Justice, Yes Peace

Among the signs that were spotted at a major pro-Palestine protest in New York back in November, there was one that read "Ceasefire Now," and another nearby insisting "No Peace on Stolen Land".

In my constant search for gallows humor to cut the bitterness of the present moment, I couldn't help but chuckle at this incongruity -- two messages at the same march, one calling for an end to violence, the other insisting that the violence must continue. And yet, despite their seemingly obvious incompatibility, one suspects that the sign-bearers don't see any conflict.

At one level, this validates the suspicion many pro-Israel folks have about the disingenuity of at least some calls for a "ceasefire" -- namely, that they don't want a ceasefire at all. They don't have a problem with military action per se, they just think only Palestinian militants should be allowed to do it -- a war where only one side is allowed to show up.* There is no incompatibility, it turns out, in demanding a ceasefire on October 6 and October 8 while insisting on the legitimacy of more October 7s. 

At another level, this illustrates something far more banal about calls for a "ceasefire" -- namely, "on what conditions"? As I've noted, everybody -- no matter what "side" they align with -- would support a cessation of hostilities under certain conditions. For some, the conditions are "the elimination of the Zionist settler-colony"; for others, it may be "the complete overthrow and overhaul of Gaza's Hamas-run government." Of course, these conditions are neither easily imposed nor agreed upon by at least one party to the conflict, hence, no ceasefire. And even once we get past those extremities, there still are plenty of sticking points that can thwart a ceasefire proposal. It's no accident that both Hamas and Israel have, over the course of the past few months, been in the position of rejecting various ceasefire proposals on offer. Neither party, unsurprisingly, is bent on an unconditional ceasefire. For both, there are certain demands that, if not met, will prompt them to keep fighting. And the same is true of their external backers. There is essentially no genuine "anti-war" movement to speak of, prioritizing ending the conflict above all else. What there is, rather, is widely divergent disagreements over under what circumstances war and military action are justified.

And that, in turn, brings to mind a different slogan one might find associated with protests like these: "No Justice, No Peace." Like "no peace on stolen land," this slogan places a boundary -- a condition -- on calls for peace. It is against a "ceasefire" that allows injustice to persist and retrench itself while under siege. It explains a circumstance in which calls for peace will be rejected; where violence must continue. Peace is not a sacrosanct good. Where there is no justice, then peace cannot be allowed to obtain.

We all, I think, can grasp the appeal of this slogan. And essentially anyone who is not a full-scale pacifist agrees with it in part -- believing that some injustices cannot be acquiesced to in peace. But I also think the events of the past few months should also prompt a critical reflection on this slogan, whose romantic valorization of the noble struggle perhaps masks what "No Justice, No Peace" actually means in practice.

Israelis will tell you that the war in Gaza is a war about justice: justice for those maimed, kidnapped, raped and murdered on October 7. They aren't without a point. Is it "justice" that those who orchestrated that awful butchery walk free? Is it "justice" that Hamas after all the terror it has wrought remains entrenched in power in Gaza? There is no justice in those states of affairs. Justice is ensuring that Hamas is utterly destroyed. Justice is seeing the terrorists behind October 7 either in custody or in graves. And so to those who call for a ceasefire now, the Israeli response at its most basic is: "no justice, no peace."

Of course, from the other perspective, there are different injustices that generate the impetus behind "no peace" -- the injustices of occupation, of settler violence and IDF attacks, of the Nakba, and so on. And one can respond to that expanded list of injustices with yet more injustices coming from the opposite direction. My point is not to litigate every party's litany of injustices. My point is to simply observe that this -- these past few months -- is what "No Justice, No Peace" actually looks like when brought into its fullest, most terrible bloom. Countless dead, countless more suffering, unspeakable devastation and destruction -- all for a "justice" that has proven itself elusive.

It may be that some justice is necessary for peace to endure, but the brute reality is that the opposite is true as well: in any realistic rendition, peace will only be achieved by consciously agreeing to yield to some measure of injustice. If one wants peace, one must be willing to support it even accepting that peace means some injustice will not be mended, that some villains will go free, that some wrongs will be allowed to persist -- to say "no justice, but yes peace." 

The rawer the lack of justice is, the more this reality will rankle. Just a few weeks after October 7, before the ground invasion began, I wrote:

It is infuriating that the proximate villains of the atrocities on October 7 are largely inaccessible to be brought to justice. At some level, what we're seeing is an interplay between Israel's immense power (in the form of bombs and missiles and tanks) and terrible impotence (to have stopped the attacks in the first place, to bring justice to their actual perpetrators).

.... It is, I'll repeat, infuriating that we can't figure out a way compatible with basic human rights standards to make it so that Hamas pays its deserved price for the atrocities it committed on October 7.

It is infuriating. It is, in a sense, unacceptable. And yet, it may have to be accepted, if peace is to reign. For if that fury makes one truly insistent on "No Justice, No Peace," it is a fury that can justify near-endless war and carnage.

To be sure, one can take this insight too far as well: the whole reason this slogan has the purchase it does is, again, we all have a sense that some injustices cannot be acquiesced to peacefully. We're all figuring out where that line is, and it's hard for a reason. There's no obvious rule for when peace must yield to justice or vice versa.

But what I will say is that peace is very precious, because not-peace is awful. One should be very hesitant to shatter peace even for the noblest cause, because there is no such thing as a war in which only side is allowed to show up.

* For what it's worth, one does have to pay the piper on this, and so to the extent one characterizes Israel and Palestine (or Hamas) as "at war", then both sides are allowed to show up. This means that, even if I think it would be fantastic if Hamas was annihilated as a military force as soon as possible, genuine military actions by Hamas -- e.g., attacking Israeli soldiers in Gaza -- are not themselves war crimes. While all is not fair in war and there are ways of prosecuting a war that are criminal, at the very least in a war Israeli soldiers are allowed to target Palestinian militants and vice versa.