The Beinart Notebook

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The Israeli elections were yesterday.

To discuss the results, our first guest is Sami Abu Shehada, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and former Knesset member who led the Balad Party until he withdrew from this year’s elections after having been disqualified by Israel’s Central Elections Committee.

Our second guest is Avrum Burg, a former Knesset speaker who has undergone a remarkable ideological journey and now questions Jewish statehood itself. We discuss the results of the Israeli elections and the nature of the Israeli political system.

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Our guest is Aharon Dardik. Aharon is an Israeli-American ex-settler, and conscientious objector to the Israeli military. He was a nonviolent activist at Columbia University. He was recently detained by the Israeli forces while doing protective presence for West Bank Palestinians during olive harvest.

We discussed:

Dardik’s experience attempting protective presence

Trying to converse with soldiers

Dardik’s childhood on a settlement and how he outgrew it

Interacting with loved ones who still support Israel

Whether Israeli settlers should leave or remain, but as equals

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Our guest is Assal Rad, author of Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide. We talked about how American media has covered Israel-Palestine, about recent efforts by Israel’s supporters to gain ownership of key institutions in American media, and about alternative media and how it is shaping the American foreign policy debate.

We discuss:

How the problem is not limited to Fox News

The methods employed by media that support Israel

How the internet has changed our access and relationship to information

The use and avoidance of terms like “genocide” and “Palestine”

Contextualizing Oct 7th

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Our guest today is Swedish journalist, Göran Rosenberg. He’s the author of A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, Israel, a Personal History, and Another Zionism, Another Judaism.

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Our guests today are UC-Berkeley History Professor Ussama Makdisi and UCLA English Professor Saree Makdisi talking about their new book, Anti-Palestinianism.

We discuss:

How the charge of antisemitism is used to stifle pro-Palestinianism

Academic suppression of the pro-Palestinian movement

Permission to narrate

How can there be reconciliation with a society that largely supported genocide?

The potential impact on Palestinians of China’s ascendancy and America’s decline

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Our guests are two of the most sophisticated and fearless internal critics of Israeli politics and society: Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst for Israel at the International Crisis Group and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, and Raef Zreik, a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.

We discuss:

Israel’s attempt to ban Palestinian candidates in the upcoming election

The absence of a true left in Israel

The attempt to bring West Bank apartheid to all of Israel

How NAZA finally broke through the Israeli bubble

Living post-10/7 as a Palestinian citizen of Israel

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Our guests today are Meir Javedanfar, lecturer in Iranian Studies at Reichman University in Tel Aviv, and Nader Hashemi, professor of Middle East politics at Georgetown. Though both are from Iran, they offer two very divergent perspectives on Iran’s history and present. I’m grateful they were willing to let me moderate a discussion between them.

Topics include:

The origins of the Iran-Israel conflict

Whether Iran’s international policy is motivated more by politics or religion

Why America and Israel have gone to war with Iran now

Whether arming Iranian insurgents could have overthrown the regime

Whether the Iranian regime is stronger or weaker now than it was before Israel and the US attacked

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The August AMA video is here for Premium members. A sample portion is free for all.

Topics include:

* The California proposal to make Judaism an ethnicity

* The dangers of purity politics

* Israel needs enemies

* Rahm Emanuel is stuck in his pro-Israel upbringing

* Navigating Jewish disagreement

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Our guests are two of the most sophisticated and fearless internal critics of Israeli politics and society: Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst for Israel at the International Crisis Group and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, and Raef Zreik, a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.

We discuss:

Israel’s attempt to ban Palestinian candidates in the upcoming election

The absence of a true left in Israel

The attempt to bring West Bank apartheid to all of Israel

How NAZA finally broke through the Israeli bubble

Living post-10/7 as a Palestinian citizen of Israel

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Our guest is Avner Gvaryahu, former executive director of Breaking the Silence, which takes testimony from former Israeli soldiers. He’s currently doing research at Oxford University on the use of AI in war. With all the debate around the new documentary, NAZA, I wanted to talk to Avner about the IDF and military culture and methods.

We discuss:

How the filmmakers kept its subjects anonymous

Why the Israeli military ran out of military targets two days into the assault on Gaza

How AI can turn soldiers into rubber stamps

How the Israeli right is using NAZA to attack the Israeli center-left

How Israeli “liberals” participated in the genocide

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Our guest today is Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller. He was the longtime Hillel Director at UCLA. He’s a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and was ordained by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik at Yeshiva University. He has opposed Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for close to half a century, first with Breira, and more recently, with A Land for All and Smol Emuni.

He has published two essays in the last year: A Zionism for the Future and ‘For the sins we have committed’: Reimagining Yom Kippur liturgy in a post-Oct. 7 world (with David N. Myers)

I had him on to discuss Jewish statehood, a topic on which we disagree. But mostly, we discussed the idea of repentance, both individual and collective, and how he answers Jews who believe that Judaism itself has been fundamentally stained by the crimes committed in our people’s name.

Topics include:

Does Jewish religious observance make Jews behave better or worse?

If there’s a non-chauvinistic way for Jews to see ourselves as “chosen”

When does Zionism become idolatry?

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On the 25th anniversary of September 11, we discuss the enduring legacy of that day. Our guests are Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and the newsletter, Forever Wars, and Iyad El-Baghdadi, co-author of The Middle East Crisis Factory and Editor-in-Chief of Kulna. I can’t think of two better people to explain how 9/11 still haunts Americans, the Middle East and the entire world.