Israel is Not Hungary

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Cenk Uygur, co-creator and host of The Young Turks, a popular progressive political show. A month or so ago, Cenk and I were interviewed together by Piers Morgan and while we agreed about the war in Iran and US policy towards Israel, I was uncomfortable with some of the ways he spoke about Israel’s supporters in the US. Some of his subsequent comments have added to my concern. We spoke privately and then agreed to hold a public conversation. I’m struggling these days to find the right way of speaking to, and about, people who rightly demand a change in US policy toward Israel but sometimes express themselves in ways I find troubling. I’m grateful to Cenk for being willing to publicly discuss my concerns— and, of course, I’m open to hearing his critiques of me. Please join us.Cited in Today’s VideoNaftali Bennett and Yair Lapid join forces to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu, and pledge not to govern with Israel’s Palestinian citizens.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!), 23 Palestinians reflect on the impact of Israel’s genocide on their lives.The disastrous legacy of Trump’s pullout from the Iran nuclear agreement.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Bard College Professor Ziad Abu-Rish about the roots of Israel’s aggression against Lebanon.AppearancesOn May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.On May 18, I’ll be speaking to Town Hall Seattle and Third Place Books in Seattle, Washington.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, there’s been a big development in Israeli politics. Israel has elections that will be later this year, and in the effort to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu, two of his most prominent opponents, Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister, and Yair Lapid, the former Foreign Minister, have teamed up together. If you remember, they were in a short-lived kind of one-year-long government together as a kind of unity government, and they’ve joined up together in the election. And this is explicitly being billed as people coming together across the ideological spectrum to defeat Netanyahu and to save Israeli liberal democracy.So, both Bennett and Lapid have cited what happened in Hungary, where the opposition forces kind of united in a broad tent to defeat Viktor Orban as a kind of model for defeating Netanyahu, and therefore kind of saving Israeli democracy through a coalition of the left and the right. Yair Lapid is conventionally described as a kind of figure of the center left. Bennett is a figure of the center-right, but Lapid described Bennett as, ‘a man of the right, but a man of the liberal, decent, law-abiding right.’And you can see how this framing would apparently seem to make a lot of sense in a comparative perspective, right? There’s been this discourse for many years now about figures like Trump, and Orban, and Modi, and Bolsonaro, and Marine Le Pen in France, and all of these as kind of representing this illiberal ethno-nationalist force around the world. And the question has been: how do people who believe in liberal democracy come together across their different ideological divides, but consolidate the support of people who believe in the principle of liberal democracy? And so, this appears to be that same dynamic happening in Israel, and I suspect there will be a lot of coverage in the American press that looks at it in this way.It’s fundamentall