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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We're awaiting remarks by President Biden in Israel. When he speaks, we will take those remarks. One thing about the war and the crisis in the Middle East is that almost nobody can see how it ends. Each side insists on its right, in fact, its obligation to violently defend itself when it's violently attacked. Each side has suffered massive numbers of casualties. Each side cites history, not just current events, to justify its actions. Each side often says there are not two legitimate sides at all to the basic questions in the region. Is there any way out? Journalist and commentator Peter Beinart hopes so. He has a New York Times essay called, There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. Peter Beinart, for those who don't know his work, has long written about US foreign policy and about Israel. He's an editor-at-large for Jewish Currents magazine, has previously been editor-in-chief of the New Republic, teaches national reporting and opinion writing at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and political science at the CUNY Graduate Center.

He is author of books including The Icarus Syndrome from 2010, about the US overreaching in foreign policy, especially in its recent wars, and his 2012 book, The Crisis of Zionism. Again, his New York Times essay published on Saturday is called There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. Peter, always good to have you on the show. How horrible that it's under all these circumstances, but welcome back to WNYC.

Peter Beinart: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Your article, I want to tell our listeners, fundamentally addresses something that came up on the show from a caller this week, with a Palestinian scholar guest at the time. The caller asked, wouldn't the Palestinians be more successful in their fight for self-determination if they were strictly non-violent and look like the moral superiors like Nelson Mandela and the ANC in Africa and the anti-apartheid struggle or Gandhi's movement in India or Martin Luther King's here? Your article opens with exactly that analogy. I hadn't read it before we had that call. Would you start where your article starts in South Africa in 1988 and tell the story of how you think it and the world response to it compares to the Palestinian experience?

Peter Beinart: Sure. In 1988, there was a series of bombings in white civilian areas in South Africa. The African National Congress, Nelson Mandela's organization, which was waging a struggle to overthrow the apartheid system, did something pretty remarkable. It basically said, our fighters did this, and it was wrong and we're going to try to make sure it never happens again. Now, the ANC was not a nonviolent organization. Since 1961, the ANC had agreed to the wage arms struggle, but it wanted to make sure it wasn't doing so against civilian targets.

That's the moral statement that it made about how it would wage war in 1988. The point I was trying to make in the piece is, if you want to think about the vast distance between that moral statement by the ANC and this hideous, horrific massacre of civilians by Hamas, we need to think about why the ANC was able to do that. It had a moral code, a moral tradition that is very far away from Hamas', and that was internal to the ANC and its history, but it was also able to maintain that moral code because by 1988, the ANC and Black South Africans, in particular, saw that it was working, that there were sanctions by the US Congress, divestment from large number of American and Western institutions. It created a virtuous cycle where it was easier to maintain this moral, this ethical resistance because Black South Africans could see it was succeeding.

What I fear has happened in the Palestinian case is that because Palestinian efforts that are ethical, that are non-violent, or at least certainly do not target civilians, because those have been defeated in recent decades, it has empowered groups like Hamas that resist in the most brutal and immoral way.

Brian Lehrer: An example in your article of the West rejecting nonviolent means is the BDS movement, boycott, divest, sanction, aimed at the Israeli economy and the Western establishments' rejection of that compared to the divestment from South Africa movement, which grew to be so important in the struggle to dismantle apartheid. Can you compare the two and the response to them as you see it in a little more detail?

Peter Beinart: Yes, the move for Palestinian civil society organizations, I think 173 Palestinian civil society organizations, to appeal to the world explicitly on the model of the appeal that Black South African organizations made to the world for boycott, divestment, and sanction was an effort to nonviolently, in the language of human rights and international law, put pressure on Israel to force it to fundamentally change its policies and give Palestinians basic rights. This timing of it is also very important because that call comes in 2005 in the wake of a second intifada in which Palestinians had used a great deal of violence, including against civilians, including in these horrific suicide bombings. Even though the BDS movement doesn't explicitly repudiate those, it is clearly trying to offer an alternative to that terrible and also self-destructive violence that happened in the second intifada. Now, one doesn't have to sign up to every single form of boycott or divestment or sanction that Palestinians are proposing.

There are legitimate debates that one can have about academic boycotts in particular for instance, but the fact that any form of nonviolent boycott, sanction, or divestment in the United States was not only deemed anti-Semitic, but in many states, has essentially been nearly criminalized, where if you are a state employee, you have to literally sign a pledge not to boycott Israel to have state employment, this is so radically different from how the United States behaved in the 1980s during the anti-apartheid movement, that it has left many Palestinians feeling that this form of nonviolent resistance does not work, and that, it seems to me, empowers, it does not justify in any way, but it empowers groups like Hamas that resist in brutal and immoral ways.

Brian Lehrer: Let me just alert our listeners that we've been given a two-minute warning, so now that would be about a minute and a half from now, for President Biden's remarks live from Israel. Again, we will take those remarks as soon as he starts speaking. In fact, here is the President. President Biden speaking live in Israel. He began with the horrors of the October 7th terrorist attack on civilians by Hamas and the ongoing hostage crisis. He expanded on details of grief after losing loved ones and the beginnings of recovery from that, even after deaths from terrorism, and praised Israeli neighbors helping neighbors after the attack. Biden talked about the concept of Israel as a safe place for the Jewish people after the Holocaust and everything else. He said Israel will be stronger than ever and warned other countries to not widen the war. He also said the Palestinian people are not the same as Hamas and shouldn't be seen that way. He referred to the massive loss of life at a hospital in Gaza yesterday and said the intelligence, as far as he knows it, is that the attack was carried out by a militant group in Gaza, not Hamas, another one, but not by Israel as far as he could tell so far. He said he asked the Israeli cabinet this morning to continue humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza coming in from Egypt, and he called on Hamas not to divert that assistance, and he said he demanded that the Red Cross be allowed to work in Gaza.

He reminded Israel that as a democracy, it's supposed to live by the rule of law, not the rules of terrorism. If you give that up, he said, then the terrorists win, and he called for a two-state solution. He ended by again promising the US will walk with Israel in the days to come. We'll talk about it in a minute with Peter Beinart from Jewish Currents Magazine and who wrote the New York Times essay last weekend called There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. We'll talk more about Peter's essay as well. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we continue with Peter Beinart, we started talking about his article in the New York Times over the weekend, and then we got interrupted by the speech in Israel by President Biden. We will talk about both things. Again, to remind you of who Peter Beinart is, he has long written about US foreign policy and about Israel. He's an editor-at-large for Jewish Currents magazine, has previously been Editor-in-Chief of the New Republic, teaches national reporting and opinion writing at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is author of books, including The Icarus Syndrome from 2010 about the US overreaching in foreign policy, especially in its recent wars, and his 2012 book, The Crisis of Zionism, and again, his New York Times essay published on Saturday is called There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. Peter, did the president make any news there to your ears, say anything new or position the United States in any way that we haven't heard before or that you'd like to characterize?

Peter Beinart: Well, he made some news by making a claim about the cause of this bombing of the hospital. I also think his tone has shifted since his initial comments right after the horrible attacks on October 7th. He's still standing with Israel, but they're clearly now concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, both because it is really nearly catastrophic, and I think also because they're very concerned about the impact this is having across the entire Middle East, where there's a rising tremendous sense of rage at both Israel and also the United States. He mentioned that he still supports a two-state solution. I think that there were elements of what he said here that he had not said before.

Brian Lehrer: Is there any indication that the US is influencing Israel in how it responds to the October 7th attack in Gaza?

Peter Beinart: I think it's a little bit too early to say. I think that there is an overwhelming belief among Jewish Israelis that Israel needs to go in and destroy Hamas. I think my suspicion is what the Biden administration is saying, especially behind closed doors, is what is your plan for once you go in on the ground? I thought it's important that President Biden referenced September 11th as if to say, listen, we're not speaking here as people who haven't made tremendous mistakes ourselves, these are the conversations that Americans failed to have sufficiently before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan and learned that it's not so hard to overthrow governments, but once you end up occupying a territory, you could be there in very, very difficult circumstances for a very long time. The harsh reality is nobody in Israel that I have heard has a credible plan for what it would do after destroying the Hamas leadership in Gaza. Who is going to run Gaza? Israelis do not want to do it themselves, but any Palestinian government they tried to put in authority, they tried to put in on the ground would look like a puppet government, and it would certainly be an insurgency that Israel would ultimately be on the hook to respond to. I suspect and hope that the Biden administration is asking those questions behind the scenes.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any thoughts on a best way to proceed after they dismantle Hamas' infrastructure, assuming they succeed at that?

Peter Beinart: The broad principle, the way that structures my thinking, and I should say my thinking is not in the mainstream, nowhere near the mainstream among Jewish Israelis, would be that, first of all, I would try to find a way of getting the hostages out. I would suggest that Israel consider prisoner swaps with Palestinian prisoners who are no longer a threat. Those who are elderly, for instance, those who can no longer really participate in attacks again. Again, I don't think there's much appetite for this among Jewish Israelis, but that would give the best chance of making sure that as many of those people who are suffering desperately and their families who are suffering desperately come out alive. Then, more generally, I fundamentally see this as a political problem. The political problem is that Israel is controlling millions of Palestinians who lack the most basic rights. Unless you create a horizon of hope for Palestinians that they will have basic rights, you are going to be in a situation where groups like Hamas that do tremendous damage to the Palestinian cause through their immorality, their brutality, their savagery, that they are empowered. Hamas is coming out of this so far empowered. I would look at questions like settlement growth in the West Bank.

The Palestinian authority, one big reason it's lost all legitimacy as an alternative to Hamas, is that it was created to be the embryo of a Palestinian state. It is cooperated with Israel to prevent attacks on Israelis. It has largely done what the US and Israel wanted, and it has failed massively in the eyes of Palestinians because settlement growth accelerates and Palestinians move further and further away from the basic rights of individual rights and self-determination that all peoples want. I think you have to think in that wider prism if you're going to have a political strategy and not just a military one against Hamas.

Brian Lehrer: You call on both Israelis and Palestinians who are willing to try anew, hard as it is in the current environment, to create new forms of political community built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides, your words from the article. You write, "The effort may fail, but the alternative is to descend flags waving into hell." Do any such efforts exist today that you know of?

Peter Beinart: There are small scale efforts, and they're deeply moving to me. For instance, there are organizations of Israeli Jews and Palestinians who have lost loved ones, of the bereaved parents, circle combatants for peace. These are families that have been in mourning for the loss of their family members during this conflict over the decades, and yet they've come together across the divide based on the principle that they don't want any family, Jewish or Palestinian, to go through what they go through. I find that profoundly moving. Politically, there are also people in Israel who want to create a genuinely Palestinian and Jewish party. This is really important. In Israel today, basically you have Jewish parties and you have Palestinian parties, essentially. You don't have even one significant political party that really models the idea of a politics which is not based on ethnicity and religious identity, but is based on a shared set of values. Such a party would not do that well in the elections. It certainly wouldn't be able to lead the government, but it would become a vision of a kind of politics that in Israel really doesn't exist today, which is a vision of a movement for equality that brings Jews and Palestinians together. I really hope that we see that in the years to come.

Brian Lehrer: We're getting phone calls and text messages from listeners on various sides of this. Some of these, I must say, defend violent resistance and use historical examples. One text says, Warsaw ghetto resistance, immoral resistance, Haiti, the US Colonies, 1776. How do you respond to that?

Peter Beinart: Well, I think there's a very important distinction, both under international law and just in terms of basic morality, between violent resistance that is aimed at military targets and violent resistance, armed resistance that is aimed at civilian targets. It's true, in the case of Ukraine, the United States is supporting Ukrainians to fight back against Russia, but I would hope that if the Ukrainians carried out a massacre that specifically targeted ordinary Russian civilians, we would be repulsed by that, even though we believe in the legitimacy of the Ukrainian cause. It's even worse in the case of Hamas because Hamas has now developed over the decades quite a long history of targeting civilians. It's not just it just began on October 7th, and that's combined with an Islamist vision that is not really a vision of liberal democracy and equality under the law. All of that put together seems to me that even if you believe that there are situations where armed resistance is legitimate, again, the African National Congress used armed resistance, Ukraine used armed resistance, the American revolutionaries used armed resistance, that's a far cry from a fundamentally illiberal organization that has repeatedly targeted civilians.

Brian Lehrer: On the other side, some of the texts we're getting include this one, BDS should not be criminalized. This refers to what we were discussing before Biden's speech where you said nonviolent acts of resistance by Palestinians have been marginalized in the West, and that's one of the reasons they become so desperate that Hamas winds up getting some support. BDS, boycott, divest, sanction Israel as a nonviolent act of resistance, similar to the divestment from South Africa movement during the apartheid era, as you were making that comparison, but BDS is rejected by the West. Listener writes, "BDS should not be criminalized, but its Palestinian leadership opposes Israel's existence and opposes dialogue with Zionists, even Israeli peace activists, they oppose all forms of normalization with ordinary Israelis." Somebody else writes-- Sorry because they're coming in so fast. Well, another one to summarize, says, "It's hard because Palestinians have taught their children for generations now to hate Israelis and hate Jews." How do you respond to either of those things?

Peter Beinart: On the second one, if you talk to Palestinians, I know you do on the show, and you ask Palestinians why they have so much anger towards Israel, I have never heard a Palestinian tell me that the source of that anger is something they read in a textbook or on a TV show. What they cite is their own lived experience of profound suffering, which goes back to 1948 when most Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes in fear. That's the source of the rage and anger, just like the source of the rage and anger in Israel is the trauma. I think that's a bit of a red herring. On BDS, look, my point is not to say that I think everybody needs to be a card-carrying member of the BDS movement and support every single position that it holds. I myself have criticisms of this anti-normalization effort that I think sometimes can shut down dialogue. My point would be this, if you are revolted by Hamas and you are in pain because of the horrible things that Hamas did, as I am, and as every Jewish person I know is, but you also believe that there is something profoundly wrong in denying people for such a long time their most basic human rights, and you recognize that calling Israel an apartheid state, as painful as it is, for many of us Jews, is no longer a controversial question among human rights groups, including Israel's own most prominent human rights groups, then you have to ask yourself a difficult question, what forms of ethical nonviolent resistance will you support?

Maybe it's not BDS. Maybe it's an effort at the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, or some conditionality on US military aid so that it's not used to defend settlements. If you don't give Palestinians any horizon for ethically having the opportunity to have the same basic freedoms that we want, then, tragically, I fear we empower those who are resisting in the most barbaric and immoral ways.

Brian Lehrer: Ari in Somerset, New Jersey, you're on WNYC with Peter Beinart. Hi, Ari.

Ari: Good morning. How are you? Thank you. I just came back from Israel last night. I've been there for 10 days, got there before the incident on August 7. I've been talking with a lot of people in Israel and a friend of mine in Israel. There's a consensus among most Israeli and most Palestinian that the two-state solution is the solution and the only solution. Honestly, there are forces on the ground to try to prevent it from both sides, from the Israeli side, and from the Palestinian side. Every time we're getting close to any kind of progress, someone either from the Israeli side or the Palestinian side does something to prevent that progress to move forward. The only solution for the Israeli side is to elect a government that is willing to and believe in a two-state solution, but it can't be done in one side. Radical forces in the Palestinians will never stop. Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hizbollah and mostly Iran, they don't want that. Anytime we get close, they do something like that. The public say, "Hey, we can't trust any kind of solution because those radical force." At this point, as terrible as it is, it might be an opportunity, but that opportunity depend on our ability to eradicate Hamas. It might be the only way to do it, it might be, whether it's painful it is to go in the ground. When and if we do that, we have to come and deal with extremists in the Israeli side.

You can't have a government that believes that all this land belongs just to the Israeli. Two-state solution is the only solution. We have to in some way united the world to put pressure on Israel, but it can't be just in Israel alone, it has to be from the moderate into the Palestinian and into Hamas to make sure that they don't get money from Qatar and they don't get all the money that the Israeli are allowed to get in from Qatar goes into build tunnels and infrastructure that from there will launch missiles into Israel. I think every time we just put [unintelligible 00:25:53] for another round of violence because there isn't really a leadership around the world to push the two sides to get into some sort of two-state solution agreement. That's going to go forever. The idea of the Hamas it's really to break the spirit of the Israeli society. Obviously, they got a great friend in the name of Benjamin Netanyahu and this so-called reform that helped Hamas to break the spirit of the Israeli public to agree to two-state solution.

Brian Lehrer: Ari, thank you very much for your call. I want to ask you one follow-up question. With all you said, I'm curious how you see the role of the United States, as it's been in recent times, or as you would like it to be.

Ari: Well, the United States has to demand Israel to stop any kind of settlement or kind of any support, financial, whatever. The very first thing, Israel is a force in the ground, and Israel has to understand that in order to have two-state solution, they cannot build settlement. There should be a complete freeze on all settlements in order to move forward with any kind of support, military, financial, diplomatic into Israel. When Israel will understand that they don't have any more support, that's what's going to happen. Israel play tremendous impact on American political. The whites in America, evangelist whites in America mostly don't believe in a two-state solution. When Israel feel that the Republicans are supporting that view, they have no intents to do that because they understand that Congress would not go along with any kind of freeze of support to Israel. That's another problem.

Brian Lehrer: Another problem. Ari, I'm going to leave it there and get Peter Beinart's reaction. We really, really appreciate your call. Thank you very much.

Peter Beinart: Yes, I wanted to thank Ari as well. I also just wanted to say, Ari, if you're still listening, that I hope you haven't lost anybody too close to you, or that you don't have anybody who's captured in Gaza. I personally don't know that the two-state solution is any longer possible, but if people want to prove me wrong, then that would be great. We are in the midst under this Israeli government the largest settlement expansion perhaps in Israel's history. It seems to me if you want to keep alive the possibility of a Palestinian state based in the West Bank, even if you didn't think it was possible tomorrow, just to keep the prospect alive, the United States would have to do something to stop that settlement growth because it simply makes the possibility of a sovereign viable Palestinian state absolutely impossible. On the question of destroying Hamas [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: By the way, just to follow up on what you were just saying in response to that part of Ari's call, we certainly didn't hear anything like that in the speech just now from Israel from President Biden. All he was calling on Israel to do was treat Palestinian civilians in Gaza in as humanitarian way as they can while they try to root out Hamas. I don't know that he goes further than that, in general, to put any pressure on Israel to stop and dismantle settlements in the West Bank. How do you see it?

Peter Beinart: Yes, I thought there were elements of Biden's speech that were very moving. He has a great capacity for empathy. I think the Biden administration in its policy towards Israel, Palestine will be judged harshly by history because Biden came in basically with the view that he wasn't going to take any political risks inside the United States to try to create any horizon for Palestinian freedom to end a situation in which Palestinians live without basic rights because they didn't want the political headache and they wanted to focus on China and other things. They thought they could just manage this. I think people who were closer to the Palestinian reality must have been telling them that it's not possible to do that. You can't just expect that year after year after year, people will live without the most basic rights under a suffocating blockade in the West Bank where Palestinians are increasingly being ethnically cleansed from their homes in the parts of the West Bank and think that things will just go along quietly while you want to focus on other things. I think they bear some of the responsibility for the despair.

Of course, they don't bear responsibility for the attacks directly. That, of course, falls entirely on Hamas. They have contributed to this climate that has made Mahmoud Abbas and moderate Palestinian leaders evermore irrelevant and has led more Palestinians to be willing to support these terrible attacks. I think history will not be kind to that.

Brian Lehrer: You wanted to respond to another thing from Ari's call. I interrupted you. Do you remember?

Peter Beinart: No, no, no. That's fine. The question about destroying Hamas, you could end Hamas' leadership over Gaza and you could kill a lot of its members and you could destroy a lot of its infrastructure, but Hamas as a political resistance movement will continue. I suspect there's some in Hamas that actually might even prefer that than to have to pick up the garbage in Gaza as a local governing entity, which they have done a pretty lousy job of. The other thing, I think it's really important, is to remember history. Even if Hamas were destroyed, Hamas was only created in the late 1980s. Palestinians have been fighting against Zionism in Israel since long, long before that, including with terrible attacks on civilians. The airplane hijackings, the Munich massacre of 1972, those were not committed by Hamas. Hamas didn't exist. They weren't committed by Islamist groups. They were actually committed largely by leftist Palestinian groups. The point is [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: You go back in your article all the way to 1929 before there was a state of Israel that could be an oppressor, an attack in Hebron that killed the Jews.

Peter Beinart: That was before the creation of the state of Israel. There have been terrible, terrible Palestinian acts of violence going back a very long time, and there have also been terrible Israeli acts of violence. My point is if you think that you will solve this by getting rid of Hamas but not dealing with the underlying conditions, I fear that what you will get will be some new Palestinian organization that will continue to fight Israel. If those organizations don't feel pressure from their people and don't see a path to having success in an ethical way, they will also do terrible, terrible things. Getting rid of Hamas, even if you can do it, will not solve the underlying problem.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. Listener texts, "As far as the children of each culture hating one another, in Northern Ireland, they teach young children, Catholic and Protestant, side by side for generations to solve the problem." I'll note that you used Northern Ireland as another example, as you used South Africa, of perhaps a model for resolving something that has devolved descending flag waving by both sides into hell, as you describe it, from the point when it was a violent resistance in Northern Ireland. Would you use that model a little bit, and then we're out of time?

Peter Beinart: I think the most important thing to remember about Northern Ireland is the Irish Republican army set off bombs at the Harrod Department Store in London and many other civilian attacks and did unspeakable things. When Catholics in Northern Ireland gained political equality and had a genuine political voice, the IRA as a terrorist organization ceased to exist essentially because there was no need for it. This, to me, is the fundamental thing we need to keep hold of. When people have basic political rights and the ability to express themselves politically, their likelihood of using armed resistance and violence against civilians goes way down. That's why I genuinely believe that this will be a safer place for Israeli Jews as well as Palestinians when Palestinians have freedom.

Brian Lehrer: Peter Beinart, editor-at-large for Jewish Currents Magazine. He teaches journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. Perhaps the best way to keep up with Peter's writing is through his substack newsletter called The Beinart Notebook, and his New York Times essay published on Saturday is called There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. Peter, thank you.

Peter Beinart: Thank you.

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