Peter David

The establishment’s reasoning is basic strategic calculation: the left will not relent on Israel; a civil war inside the party over the Jewish state would destroy the coalition; therefore, the rational move is to concede this issue, preserve party unity, and proceed with the moderate agenda on everything else: affordability, climate, migration, AI, etc. Feed this one thing to the beast, and the beast will be satisfied. It is an intelligent calculation, and it is a catastrophic one, because it rests on a misapprehension of what is being conceded and to whom. link to full essay below

Absolutely. The Democrats may learn one day what the Israelis already know… the more you feed it, the hungrier it grows. This type of beast is never satiated - it only demands more, and more, and more.

The sad thing about your question is that the campaign against Israel is an order of magnitude more intense than any campaign mounted in the west against actual genocides, from the Armenians to the Holocaust to Rwanda or Bosnia — to Yemen or Syria or Sudan just in the last few years. This is the point. Even if you consider Gaza a genocide, which obviously I don’t, even that doesn’t close the yawning gap in the response, the frenzy and hatred and urgency and turning on Jewish communities around the world merely for supporting the existence of the other half of the Jews. Not even genocides ever saw a similar reaction. Yemen just a few years earlier had a death toll four or five times larger, in a war fought by allies of the west using western weapons. 85,000 children literally starved to death, something that the mere hint that it could happen in some places in Gaza tore through the global media like a firestorm. And not a peep anywhere. No marches, no horror. The few activists who actually noticed or expressed concern wouldn’t amount to a single hour’s activism against Israel. So even throwing around the word genocide doesn’t help you here. That’s how extreme and unprecedented the anti-Israel campaign is. It requires a real explanation.

Just to show how easily the Mandela Effect takes hold: Here’s Josh Szeps telling @noam_dworman that while there’s a “tremendous amount of disinformation,” some claims are “completely verifiable,” citing videos of “the Israeli army mowing down detainees with their hands cuffed behind their backs.” Just like the Sde Teiman scandal, no such video exists. Separate images — bulldozers, half-naked detainees, prison guards bearing shields, etc. — are blended into vivid but false memories.

Hi @nyuniversity I’d like to ask you, as your alum, how the speaker below doesn’t infringe upon NYU’s policy against “using language advocating harming people or groups of people, and all relevant synonyms.”

wrote up some more thoughts on this: What Do Palestinians Think a Palestinian State Should Look Like? This is the question I'd like to see answered above all, but there are others: commentary.org/seth-mandel/wh…

Matt seems fundamentally ignorant of a bunch of stuff that's gone on since 2009. Netanyahu accepted the Two-State Solution in 2009 in his famous Bar-Ilan Speech. It was the conclusion of the Obama Administration and of Hussein Agha (Abbas's top informal negotiator) that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sunk talks in 2014 as soon as Netanyahu was getting really flexible. Under the 2013 Molcho-Agha Framework for negotiations, Netanyahu agreed to final status talks based on the following principles: [1] "Palestine" would be "an independent and sovereign state in a sustainable territory which will correspond to the size of the territory controlled by Egypt and Jordan before the 4th of June 1967,” [2] “[A]ny solution must take into account the historical, social, cultural and emotional connections of the two peoples to the city, as well as protect the holy sites.” [3] "There will be a complete withdrawal in stages of Israeli forces from the territory of Palestine. The last Israeli forces will evacuate when the final stage of the agreement comes into effect" [4] "Israelis who choose to remain in their homes in the state of Palestine will live under Palestinian law" [5] Some sort of limited Palestinian 'right of return' on an individualized basis would be up for future discussion Both sides reserved the right to oppose certain clauses, but as reported Netanyahu accepted what his top negotiator put together. This basically lines up with the book "The Last Palestinian" reporting that Netanyahu told Obama and Kerry that he could agree to evacuate large parts of the West Bank so that a Palestinian State could be established, so long as he was able to do it slowly and gradually over a number of years (perhaps up to a decade). The main reason the Obama Administration was unhappy with this was domestic American politics (Obama wanting credit). It was after this that Kerry got the Molcho-Agha channel going for framework negotiations. And "The Last Palestinian" (a biography of Mahmoud Abbas) says that Kerry got Netanyahu to agree in 2013 that "[t]he new secure and recognized border between Israel and Palestine will be negotiated based on the 1967 lines with mutual agreed land swaps." Where Netanyahu was unwilling to budge was on a continued IDF presence in the Jordan Valley for 10 to 15 years and authority to conduct raids and operations against terrorism there. Netanyahu was also unwilling to accept a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, though he was willing to accept Palestinian "aspirations" regarding East Jerusalem, and [separate from the book the Last Palestinian" Netanyahu agreed to the Palestinians getting certain East Jerusalem neighborhoods like Shuafat, Beit Hanina, and Kafr Aqab. And Netanyahu accepted a limited Palestinian right of return to Israel. According to the Last Palestinian, Obama took the Kerry framework and added express language about a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem in order to satisfy the Palestinians. Abbas balked, asked for more time to think, and then never responded. ... Also reported from the period is that Netanyahu instructed aides to draft plans to dismantle West Bank settlements and isolated settlements like Yitzhar. On the Jordan Valley specifically, Moshe Ya'alon (Deputy Prime Minister, later Defense Minister) said as early as 2011 that Netanyahu was looking at dismantling Jordan Valley settlements as part of a final status agreement. He later said that Netanyahu ordered him to draft plans to dismantle the settlements. And peace negotiator Yossi Beilin (Labor, Peace Camp, big Oslo process guy; an architect of the Geneva Initiative which @mattyglesias has thought was a good idea) in 2013 said that even in the absence of a final status agreement, Netanyahu was willing to accept a Palestinian State on provisional borders. Beilin was skeptical that Netanyahu or Abbas were willing to pay the price of what would be required for full peace, but he said he'd heard Netanyahu himself say that he was ready to establish a provisional border with the Palestinians. ... In 2015 after elections Netanyahu said he accepted the general idea of the Arab Peace Initiative (agreement with Moderate Arab States, though resistant on ideas of Palestinian return and ceding the Golan specifically). He said he told the Arab States then that he was not opposed to a demilitarized Palestinian State in principle if it recognized Israel as the nation state of the Jews alongside Palestine as the nation state of the Palestinians and the Palestinians put up with the IDF remaining in parts of the West Bank "for an extended period of time". In 2017, the Washington Post reported that Netanyahu told the incoming Trump Administration that he still favored the two state solution, but believed that the Palestinians were not ready for a deal. Netanyahu accepted the 2020 Trump-Kushner Plan, for what that's worth. That involved a Palestinian State, albeit a pretty ugly one. But according to Jared Kushner, the proposal was put out as a basis for negotiations in order to give Abbas room to make a bunch of demands to ask for more ("meat on the bone", as Kushner characterized it). Yair Lapid as the sitting Prime Minister in 2022 said at the United Nations that he accepted a Two State Solution. In early 2023 Netanyahu said on the Lex Friedman Podcast that he'd accept a Palestinian State if he didn't really have to call it one Friedman interview at 45:55 - "So people say, ah, but it's not a perfect state. I say, okay, call it what you will ... call it, I don't know, limited sovereignty, call it autonomy plus, call it whatever you want to call it, but that's the reality." Friedman interview at 46:15 - "Lex: So a two state solution where Israel controls the security of the entire region." "Netanyahu: We don't call it quite that. I mean there are different names. But the idea is yes, Israel controls security [in] the entire area ... It's this tiny area between the Jordan River and the Sea." January 18, 2024. Reuters wrote Netanyahu said "I clarify that in any arrangement in the foreseeable future, with an accord or without an accord, Israel must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River. That's a necessary condition. It clashes with the principle of sovereignty but what can you do." January 19, 2024. Reuters wrote "Biden said Netanyahu [on their call] was not opposed to all two-state solutions, and there were a number of types possible, noting that some United Nations members do not have military forces." ... Netanyahu in accepting the Trump Plan in 2025 agreed to points 9, 18, 19, and 20, which had a bunch of references to an eventual Palestinian State once Gaza was rebuilt and the Palestinian Authority completed a reform program. This was a pretty easy thing for him to do though because he fundamentally thinks the Palestinian Authority is too corrupt and dysfunctional to adopt and implement an institutional reform program.

For Jodi Harris, a longtime Brooklyn resident and lifelong progressive voter, political homelessness did not come from abandoning her beliefs. It came from watching the party she trusted become unrecognizable. Read more, share your story & subscribe: phnm.beehiiv.com/p/meet-jodi-ha…

Kind of AMAZING that @mattyglesias and mostly everyone have forgotten that the Israeli Prime Minister made a UN speech calling for the 2-state solution in September of '22. It was answered with rockets... Nobody really cared.

'Do we not care about Jews as much as black people?' @NickFerrariLBC gives us something to think about after @KemiBadenoch said that if black churches were being attacked, there would be a national emergency.

As Noah Smith said, Islamism is the future of American liberalism, and it will consume the Democratic Party like it has European left-wing parties. This sucks, and I'm not looking forward to Democrats defending terrorists.

Suggesting a positive political endgame for Palestinians isn't hard to do. I've done it. Many others have too. And these endgame suggestions would be fantastic tools in the hands of anyone looking to impose specific demands on Israel, or on Abbas or Hamas, or to offer a better future for Palestinians of the sort that might peel some away from Hamas. Palestinians have shown repeatedly that they have the tools to shape Israeli politics. But they are told by ideologues foreign and domestic that they must never use these powers, because doing so would commit the unforgivable sin of actually engaging and acknowledging the dastardly Jews. Sorry, Israelis. So no one is ever interested in endgames. The suggestions always land with a thud. The activists dismiss them out of hand as distractions from the main task. Because the main task, the purpose of the whole rabid, unprecedented campaign, unseen in scale, duration or intensity in any conflict or country or even atrocity in generations, is not to find any solution for Palestinians. The purpose is to project all Western criminality and self-abnegation and all the anxieties of this moment of social disarray onto the familiar old scapegoat and then, as in the days of old, destroy that scapegoat. It's a civilization-spanning purification ritual couched, like all such rituals in the history of Christendom and the West, as a call to righteousness and truth. And the bulk of the costs of all this blind hatred masquerading as righteousness isn't paid by Israelis or Jews, though they are paying steep costs that will only grow steeper, because this hatred is never satisfied. No, they're paid by Palestinians. They, not we, are trapped in this obsessive radicalization against Israel. They, not we, are herded by comfortable foreigners living out anti-imperialist noble-savage fantasies into ever more rounds of zero-sum war. There *are* political endgames, and they're worth fighting for. But they require a pro-Palestinian campaign that's more than just an updated version of the anti-Jewish purges of old.

This is what antisemitism looks like: x.com/sfmcguire79/st…

This was disgusting and shameful. These people aren’t progressive. They’re blue MAGA extremists.

Absolutely disgusting behavior at the Michigan Democratic Convention. A party that truly takes antisemitism seriously wouldn’t let this go unchallenged. Our leaders need to speak up and condemn it — we expect Republicans to call out hate in their ranks, and we should hold ourselves to that same standard.

Democrats are trying to buy time on Israel by making Netanyahu the whole issue. It is a way to appease an increasingly radical part of their base without admitting how far that base has moved from even conditional support for the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Easy. Camp David and Annapolis. The framework is there. Palestinians need to accept it. Now how about you articulate exactly what it would mean for American foreign policy if we did indeed throw out our alliance with Israel?

This 💯. No one in the throw-Israel-under-the-bus crowd is willing to articulate what that would actually mean for American foreign policy. For our military. For energy security for our other allies. Who Israel might turn to if the US ditches them.

If I were Israeli, I wouldn't vote for Likud. I do believe it's time for new leadership in Israel. However, that's not my decision. Israel is a democracy and it's citizens will decide their next leader. That said, no one who invokes the 'slaughter of innocents' argument has ever been able to articulate a better strategy to combat Hamas. Hamas built hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure and conducted an asymmetrical war against Israel from them. No Gazan civilian was allowed to shelter in the tunnels. Other urban wars have had similar civilian to combatant casualties -- including the US led operations against ISIS in Iraq. Yet, only Israel gets accused of genocide. Only Israel has to justify every single action they take -- which they do, by the way. The IDF documents their decision making in accordance with international law. Yet, somehow, Democrats cannot find it in themselves stand up to the outrageous accusations. Then those accusations become gospel. And polling follows. You don't have to love Israel, but you really should recognize how the relationship we have with them benefits the US. And you should make arguments about what Israel does or doesn't do in good faith and in relation to how every other country on the planet -- including the US -- acts.

And yet multiple MPs in his party just signed a motion endorsing the “genocide” antisemitic blood libel that led to these attacks on Jews, and he’s done and said nothing. Every day, the need for Israel to exist is demonstrated. It’s the only place Jews can be truly safe.