A Glimpse into The Horror in Gaza

This week’s Zoom call will be at a special time: Thursday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and author of the new book, When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. She has been sanctioned by the Trump administration, which has barred her from entering the United States and frozen her assets in the country. We’ll talk about her new book, her investigations into Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, her views of US, European, and United Nations policy toward Israel, and about the criticisms of her. We’ll also talk about what it’s like to live under US sanctions.Special OfferThis week only, all subscribers (including free subscribers) of The Beinart Notebook get a 40 percent discount on a one-year paid subscription to Robert Wright’s Nonzero Network, a group of independent Substack voices, including mine, as well as Glenn Loury, Kaiser Kuo, and others with whom I may not always agree, but who share a commitment to intellectual honesty and reasoned analysis.Cited in Today’s VideoMuhammad Shehada’s comments about life in Gaza, in conversation with Jehad Abusalim and Adam Shatz for the London Review of Books podcast.The Israeli human rights group Gisha on Israel’s restrictions on the import of toilets—and other essential civilian goods—into Gaza.The World Health Organization on the surge of “ectoparasite infections and rodent-borne illnesses” in Gaza.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!), Will Alden profiles Curt Mills, one of the intellectual architects of the anti-Israel right.See you on Thursday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, there are a lot of Jews—I know some of them well myself—who are kind of both bewildered and enraged by this turn in American public opinion and in American politics against Israel, as reflected in my own city, New York, for instance, and the fact that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the first mayor in many years not to march in the Israel Day parade, or that there’s this effort to boycott Israeli goods at this Brooklyn co-op. And there’s this sense that, kind of, why is it, people ask, many Jews ask, that there’s this fury against Israel, this rage?And the answer that’s so frequently given is that this is just an eruption of age-old antisemitism, right? A kind of return to the ancient art of Jew-hating. And of course, there is antisemitism. There is Jew-hating. Antisemitism is rising, but I just wish that some of those folks who are enraged and bewildered by this turn in public opinion, in American politics against Israel, would just spend a little bit of time looking at what Israel does, looking at what life is like for Palestinians under Israeli control.Because if you start to look even just a little, if you’re willing to open your eyes even just a little, then this anger at Israel, even this rage at Israel, and this desire to fundamentally change the way America interacts with Israel, it stops looking so pathological. It stops looking so antisemitic, because you can start to understand why people would be so upset, right?But so frequently, the people in our community who most need to look, just never look. And I just want to give one little example of what it looks like to take even a tiny peek at what it’s like to be a Palestinian under Israeli control, in this case, in Gaza. This is an extended quote from my friend Muhammad Shehada, who is from Gaza, and he was interviewed for the London Review of Books podcast by Adam Shatz in a recent episode. And I’m going to quote what Muhammad says about life in Gaza now. Muhammad says:The biggest struggle at the moment is basic shelter. Almost everyone I know is on the street. Every single member of my family, every friend that I have, every colleague, every neighbor had their homes either bombed, burned to the ground,