This War is All About the Palestinians

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC and now founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo. It’s a little unnerving to be interviewing Mehdi, who may be the single best political interviewer in America. We’ll talk about why American journalists don’t ask tougher questions. But we’ll also talk about more personal things. Mehdi isn’t only one of the most important progressive voices in American media. He’s also a Muslim who cares deeply about his faith, and about reconciling it with his progressive principles. For several years now, we’ve held a running conversation, mostly in private, about what it means to be a progressive Muslim, or a progressive Jew, when many of the people who speak for our faiths scorn the principles of human equality, and when white Christian nationalists run the United States. I’m looking forward to continuing that conversation in public this Friday. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

A few articles on South Africa’s attacks on its neighbors in the 1980s.

In 2003, Iran offered to endorse the Arab peace initiative.

Hassan Nasrallah’s 2024 statement about reaching a ceasefire when the Palestinians did.

A great article by my Jewish Currents colleague Jonathan Shamir on some other linkages between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its conduct in Lebanon and Iran.

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!), Arielle Angel and Daniel May talk to the philosopher Elad Lapidot about antisemitism, Jewishness, and genocide.

Mona Ali on how the Strait of Hormuz crisis could end US hegemony.

Defending Academic Freedom

I’m grateful to teach at the City University of New York. But, sadly, it has not been immune to the crackdown on pro-Palestinian free speech that has swept campuses since October 7, 2023, and Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In 2025, four adjunct faculty members at Brooklyn College, which is part of the CUNY system, were fired in what appears to have been retaliation for their pro-Palestinian activism. This January, thanks in part to activism by CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, three were reinstated. But a fourth has not been. Their plight has been covered in The Nation and some local politicians have taken up their cause. If you care about academic freedom—the principle that students and faculty should have the right to speak and protest about any controversial issue, especially genocide—and if you have a connection to CUNY, please consider signing this letter so that this injustice is fully remedied.

Appearances

On April 19, I’ll be speaking in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

On April 20, I’ll be speaking at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.

On April 23, I’ll be interviewing Mohammed R. Mhawish, the award-winning Palestinian journalist and writer from Gaza City, at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism.

On April 26, I’ll be speaking at Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland.

On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In 1982, the South African Defense Forces crossed the border into neighboring Lesotho, into its capital, Maseru, and killed 42 people. In 1985, the South African Defense Forces crossed into neighboring Botswana, attacked its capital, Gaborone, and killed 12 people. In 1987, the South African Defense Forces executed an attack in Zambia, in the city and the town of Livingston. In 1986, the leader of Mozambique, Samora Machel, died in mysterious circumstances, and many people believe, although it’s not been proved, that South Africa may have had a hand in his death.

Overall, over the course of the 1980s, South Africa attacked six of its neighbors. Now, why am I saying any of this? Because there’s a clear parallel between what South Africa was doing during the 1980s under apartheid, and what Israel is doing now. Why was South Africa attacking these neighbors? Because the South African government would not face, at that point, the fact that its fundamental problem was its system of oppression over its own people, over people who lived within the borders of South Africa, because that would have meant confronting a system of apartheid.

And because the South African white supremacist government was not willing to do that, it came up with an elaborate argument, which suggested that the real security threat to South Africa was external by African governments that were connected to communism in some way, and that were harboring the people in the African National Congress or other Black South Africans who were fighting against the regime, right?

So, their argument was the Black South Africans, the ANC, Nelson Mandela, these guys, they’re not the root of the problem. They’re just proxies, right? Proxies: a word you hear a lot these days, right? They’re just proxies of Zambia, of the Soviet Union, of Tanzania, right, of these leftist African regimes. And if we can basically topple these regimes in Southern Africa, then we won’t have a problem with the ANC, or Black South Africans anymore who don’t like to live under apartheid, right?

This is basically the logic that governs the way Israel is behaving now and has been behaving for many years. People like to say that Netanyahu has always been obsessed with Iran. That’s actually incorrect. Netanyahu has not always been obsessed with Iran. He’s always been obsessed with the idea that there’s some external actor that controls the Palestinians, and that if you destroy that external actor, then the Palestinians won’t be a problem anymore, because the Palestinians aren’t actually independent forces, right? They’re just the tentacle of the octopus, which is another phrase you hear a lot from Israel and its supporters, right?

So, before Netanyahu was obsessed with Iran, back in the 1980s, at the beginning of his political career, he was obsessed with the Soviet Union. He said Israel’s real problem, the real problem in the Middle East, is the Soviet Union. They control the PLO. Then, after that, when the Soviet Union fell, he started talking about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. They were the real problem. People will remember that he famously testified in favor of invading Iraq after 9/11.

And then, as Iraq was decimated by the United States, and Iran grew more powerful, Benjamin Netanyahu since then, and a lot of other Israeli leaders, have been saying that Israel’s real problem is Iran, and also Hezbollah, right? And that if Iran weren’t there, and Hezbollah weren’t there, then the Palestinians wouldn’t really be such a problem for Israel. And if Iran and Hezbollah were to be destroyed—trust me—Benjamin Netanyahu and people like him would find yet another external actor who they would say is the real problem, who is controlling the Palestinians. In fact, Naftali Bennett, who might be Israel’s Prime Minister after Netanyahu, and who thinks very similarly to Netanyahu, who has said explicitly that actually, that after Iran, the big problem is going to be Turkey.

All of this stems from the same fundamental problem—analytical problem, moral problem—that governed apartheid South Africa, a failure to look in the eye, your system of oppression, and to recognize that that system of oppression is always going to produce resistance from within, from the people who are being oppressed. Some of that resistance will be ethical and nonviolent, or in accordance with international law. Some of that resistance may be violent and kill civilians, but there will be resistance—violent and non-violent—within the principles of international law and outside the principles of international law. There always is when you are fundamentally oppressing a group of people and denying them their basic rights.

And the fundamental misconception, what’s fundamentally wrong about the way Israel thinks about Iran and Hezbollah, is basically the same problem that was wrong about the way that South Africa saw Tanzania and Zambia, and for that matter, the Soviet Union, which was to think that they were the problem.

In fact, we know that Iran has said that if there were a peace agreement with the Palestinians in accordance with the Saudi Peace Initiative—they said this many, many years ago. They went to the Bush administration and said, listen, we will endorse the Arab Peace Initiative. If the Palestinians say that they have their own state, and their grievances with Israel are over, we will accept that.

Hezbollah has also repeatedly said—they said it after October 7th. Nasrallah, the former head of Hezbollah, said, on that day, when the shooting stops in Gaza, we will stop the shooting in the south, meaning in the south of Lebanon. That’s not to say that Hezbollah doesn’t have its own grievances with Israel. Again, it was formed in resistance to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s.

It’s not to say that Iran is not a regional competitor with Israel in various ways. But the fundamental source of the conflict, the single biggest fundamental source of the conflict between Iran and Hezbollah, on one hand, and Israel, is that they are supporting the Palestinians. They do it for ideological reasons. They do it for theological reasons. They also just do it for purely pragmatic political reasons because it’s a way of gaining prestige in the Middle East, because the Palestinian cause is popular.

This was the same reason that governments in various points in Mozambique, in Zambia, in Tanzania, even the Soviet Union itself were supporting Black South Africans. And South Africa only stopped having this problem with Tanzania, with Zambia, with Mozambique, once it actually faced the root of the problem, which is suppression of Black South Africans.

And because Israel has not been willing to do that, and because the United States, certainly under Donald Trump, is not willing to do that, Israel and the United States end up waging these unbelievably destructive, criminal, illegal wars, right, which kill and destroy so many people’s lives, right, and also, fundamentally, just simply don’t work, will not work on their own terms. Because unless you deal with the root of the problem, there will always be some external actor that is willing to come to support the Palestinians in some form. And the only way, ultimately, to come to terms with those external actors is to come to terms with the Palestinians themselves.

And that’s why, even though the Palestinians and their tremendous suffering and plight in the wake of the genocide in Gaza—while it’s not on the front page—it is the core thing one has to understand about why these terrible wars are happening in Iran and Lebanon, and they will keep happening in some form or another unless Israel and the United States, as Israel’s patron, face the fundamental root of the problem.

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