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The Outgoing National Security Advisor’s Orwellian Interview at the 92nd Street Y
Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 17, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.
Our guest will be Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program and a former senior attorney at Adalah, which defends the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. We’ll talk about the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism.
I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with the longtime Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy. I have long wanted to ask Gideon what it’s like to be one of Israel’s most hated men. And how he lives in a society that he regularly accuses of committing grave crimes. I was struck by the openness and intimacy of his answers. He told me, among many other things, that every morning when he goes for a jog in the park, he sees the same woman jogging alongside him. And that every morning she greets him with the same phrase: “traitor.”
This video is for paid subscribers too.
My New Book
On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
Jake Sullivan’s interview at the 92nd St Y.
The new Lancet study on the number of dead in Gaza.
Oxfam’s comparison of deaths in Gaza to those in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen chronicles the movement to establish Jewish settlements in southern Lebanon.
Former Representative Cori Bush explains why it was worth losing her seat to defend Palestinian rights.
Vivian Silver’s son denounces Israel’s president for exploiting his mother’s memory.
See you on Friday, January 17,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, we’re in this interesting moment where top Biden administration foreign policy officials are kind of going out into the country, trying to craft a public narrative about what they did in office as they prepare to leave office. There was Antony Blinken’s interview with the New York Times a week ago or so, which I commented on last week. And then, recently I just came across the video that was put out of a public conversation that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, did at the 92nd Street Y with Ian Bremmer.
And these are really remarkable documents because they are really exercises in what George Orwell wrote about so famously, which is, the creation of a kind of dishonest and euphemistic language to try to defend things that if stated in kind of clear concrete ways, would clearly be too brutal for most people to accept. And so, I think they’re worth looking at at the level of language, which is what Orwell urged political writers to do to challenge the dishonesty of language as a way of getting at the brutality of government and the action of people in power who act brutally.
So, I want to quote something from what Sullivan says at the 92nd Street Y. He’s asked about Israel’s policies vis-a-vis the people of Gaza. And he says: ‘We believe Israel has a responsibility as a democracy. As a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law, that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.’
So, the formulation is really fascinating, right. He’s being asked about what Israel’s doing, but he starts by just stipulating a set of assumptions, right, which don’t need to be proved, right, because these are the assumptions that he begins with, right. And they’re never challenged by the interviewer. The first is that Israel is a democracy. Again, something one hears constantly, but if you think about it, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians, right?
About 70% of the Palestinians who live under the control of the Israeli government, those in the West Bank and in Gaza and in East Jerusalem. And nobody who knows anything about the reality of how Israel operates in Palestinian life could deny that the Israeli government has power—indeed life and death power—over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. And yet, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot become citizens of the state of Israel. They can’t vote for its government. The vast majority of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not citizens either, right. And that’s about 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control. About 30% are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are sometimes called Arab Israelis, who have a kind of second-class citizenship, but do enjoy citizenship and the right to vote.
So, if 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control are not citizens and can’t vote, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians. It’s a democracy for Israeli Jews. In many ways, quite a robust one. But it is about as democratic, one might say, for Palestinians as the United States was under Jim Crow for Black Americans, right, when a minority of Black Americans—those in the North—had the right to vote. But the majority of Black Americans who lived in the South did not have the right to vote. These are not esoteric or complicated things, right? They’re very basic things, right?
But you just notice how they’re basically shoved completely aside in the assumption that Sullivan starts with—that Israel is a democracy—which is simply to say that there’s a basic benevolence that he’s kind of assuming here, right. Which makes his conversation about Israeli behavior completely different than he would if he were talking about Russia or some other some other adversary because he’s essentially putting it in the camp of democracies. But, in fact, when it comes to Palestinians, it really should not be considered to be in the camp of democracies. And that’s not challenged, right. That’s an assumption that doesn’t even need to be defended.
And then he continues. He called Israel ‘a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life.’ It’s such a strange statement. He’s being asked about what’s happening in Gaza, right. Oh, the evidence in Gaza is not hard to find. It’s plentiful, right. The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal just came out with a report just recently suggesting that by the end of June, the death toll in Gaza was over 64,000 people, with almost 60% of those being women, children, and people over the age of 65. And it’s worth noting, by the way, that even men under the age of 65, most of them are not Hamas fighters. So, we’re talking about a very large majority of these people killed who are not fighters, right.
And just by kind of comparison, according to Oxfam, Israel has been killing 250 people per day in Gaza. By comparison, Ukraine, where the United States has literally imposed sanctions and sent weapons to fight against what Russia is doing, that’s more than five times the number of people who’ve been dying since the escalation of the war in Ukraine in 2022. It’s also about five times as many people dying per day as in Sudan, which the United States has now declared a genocide, right.
But what Sullivan does is he simply stipulates that Israel is committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, even though there’s literally no humanitarian aid agency, no United Nations investigative group, no journalist who’s actually really investigated what’s happening with Gaza who would suggest that Israel is committed to the basic principle of innocent life when it comes to Gaza. But Sullivan doesn’t think that’s something that actually needs to be justified. He simply stipulates it as an assumption.
Again, I use this phrase, kind of ‘mental prison,’ when I was talking about Antony Blinken. Like this is a kind of discourse that exists in Washington and could also exist at a place like the 92nd Street Y, which simply bears no reality whatsoever to the lived experience of people in Gaza, as reported by basically every humanitarian and journalist organization that has actually delved deeply into what’s happening there, right. But this is what Sullivan says before he even starts to make the argument, right. This is his kind of stated assumptions. And then he goes on to say, ‘We believe too many civilians have died in Gaza over the course of this conflict. And at too many moments, we felt we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front to get more trucks, more aid, more life-saving assistance,’ right.
So, you know, it’s fascinating. He starts by saying Israel is a democracy. Israel is committed to the principle of human life. And then, later on, he basically says: ‘We think too many people have died.’ You know, this famously, as so many people notice, this goes all of a sudden turns into the passive tense. So, all of a sudden, Israel as a subject, as an actor, disappears from the conversation, right. Too many people have died, right. Why have too many people died? Is it because perhaps because Israel is dropping all these bombs on them, perhaps because Israel is not allowing the aid to go in, right. But it’s as if somehow there was a kind of Israel’s committed to the protection of human life. But, unfortunately, there was a kind of natural disaster, which led too many people in Gaza to die. All of a sudden Israel as the subject basically disappears from the sentence. And he says, ‘we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front,’ never saying even who the United States has had to push, right?
And also, again, the implication, what does it mean to say you’re pushing, right, when the United States is still protecting Israel in all these international forums and continuing to send virtually unconditioned military aid? Pushing, right, in any other context in American foreign policy means using America’s diplomatic leverage in terms of our military and other kind of assistance to get countries to do what we want. If you’re not doing any of those things, you’re not actually pushing. A better verb would be you’re asking, you’re pleading, you’re begging, you’re cajoling, right. You’re not actually pushing if you’re not willing to use the leverage that the United States uses routinely when it comes to other countries.
As I said last week, we have to change the public discourse in the United States, such that if people like Jake Sullivan or Tony Blinken are going to go out and tell these lies, right, in this kind of Orwellian discourse of dishonesty, that they receive pushback, right. Obviously, we need a public discourse in which there is a cost, right. The cost is not that, you know, these people should be endangered in any way, G-d forbid. It’s simply that they should have to feel the experience of being forced to answer really hard questions by people in public forums who will not accept this dishonest language.
And we don’t have a public culture in the United States nearly enough—we have some exceptions like the interviews that Mehdi Hassan does, for instance—but in general, we don’t have a public culture which holds people like Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken to account. There are too many institutions, whether it’s the 92nd Street Y or the Council on Foreign Relations, where they can go and know that basically they can peddle this—for lack of a better word—bullshit, right, and basically never really have to be taken to task for it. And that I think, is part of what’s produced this tremendous alienation and cynicism that exists in so much of the American public about the fact that ordinary Americans face consequences for the things they do in their professional lives, and people at the very apex of the American government, like Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, don’t face those consequences.
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