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Reckoning with Anti-Israel Rage
Making sense of what happened last week to State Senator Scott Wiener
| Jun 29 |
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This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest
will be Brad Lander, who last week won the Democratic nomination for Congress
in New York’s 10th district. Brad’s victory is a milestone: A Jewish
congressman, running on his support for Palestinian rights, winning in one of
the most Jewish districts in the country. Even a few years ago, it would have
been unimaginable. We’ll talk about what Brad learned in his campaign, about
where he agrees and disagrees with the other insurgents who won last week in
New York City, about how he’ll deal with the AIPAC-aligned Jewish members of
Congress he’ll meet in Washington, and about the 1920 congressional race in the
Lower East Side, which he believes presaged the race he just won. This
conversation will be co-sponsored by Jewish Currents. Please join us.
Cited in Today’s Video
Scott Wiener is forced to leave the San Francisco Trans march.
The UN report on Israel’s targeting of Palestinian children.
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!), I wrote about how radically the Democratic
debate over Israel has changed.
In 972mag, Abed Abu Shehada wrote about power, purity and BDS.
In her Substack, Jill Jacobs argued that one can oppose AIPAC without viewing
it as uniquely malevolent.
I spoke in Vienna about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, there’s a video that’s been going around a lot of a Democratic state
senator from San Francisco named Scott Wiener. He’s also running to succeed
Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, and he was at this trans march in
San Francisco, and basically was kind of forced to leave the trans march by
folks who really got in his face, and were really screaming at him, and are
really, pretty nasty way about his policies on Gaza.
Now, they didn’t physically attack him, but it’s a pretty uncomfortable video
to watch. Clearly, it was pretty intimidating behavior. And there’s another
video of someone also screaming in a really nasty way, really getting in
Wiener’s face at a bar where Wiener was watching a World Cup game.
And something about this video of Wiener, I think, has really triggered
something in a lot of pro-Israel Jews in particular, and maybe Jews just more
generally, because he looks really beleaguered and kind of haggard as he just
silently takes all of this abuse. And I think it captured this sense that
exists in some elements of the American Jewish community that this is kind of
like torrent of hatred at Jews, and there’s kind of, like, nothing you can do
about it.
And I think it’s worth saying a couple of things about this video. The first is
that the people who, in these videos, who are captured in these videos, are
kind of behaving like assholes. You know, they’re not physically attacking, but
they’re really, really acting in a very intimidating and really kind of nasty
way, and I think it’s just worth saying that I think the people that we admire,
most people would admire, that certainly I admire, are people who have deep
moral conviction and moral passion and fervor and are unyielding in it about
what they believe is right, but still, in their interpersonal relations, in the
way they treat people, act with a certain level of dignity, a certain level of
decency. And I think these folks just didn’t. And I don’t think there’s a
justification for just treating people that way. I don’t think you should be an
asshole.
Secondly, being an asshole is not, I think, good politics. You know, Wiener is
a classic liberal Zionist guy. He was far too late to recognize that what
Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide, far too late to support cutting off
military aid to Israel. But now he actually has come to take those positions.
He’s moving in his views in response to public opinion, in response to all the
work that pro-Palestine activists have done.
And it’s not effective in moving people even further—and I would like him to go
further than he is now—by treating people this way. In fact, what you do, I
think, is you just allow people to turn the attention in a different direction,
and you just make it a lot easier for those people who want to claim that the
pro-Palestinian activist movement is motivated by hatred and by, you know, that
it’s a kind of mob of hooligans, whatever, that it’s antisemitic. You just make
all that a lot easier with these kind of videos. So, I also think it’s
counterproductive.
And—I won’t say, not but—because I think what those folks did and the way they
treated him was wrong. And, it’s really important that people who support
Israel in the Jewish community try to understand where this rage is coming from
because what’s so frustrating to me is that you have all of these people in my
community who spend so much time looking at videos like this one with Wiener,
in which people seem to be getting kind of accosted and victimized in some way
because they support Israel. And those folks, in my experience, spend so little
time trying to understand where this rage might actually be coming from by
looking at what Israel is actually doing. And because they spend almost no time
looking at what Israel is doing in a way that might help them understand why so
many people are enraged, that allows them to then just chalk all of this up to,
kind of, to Jew hatred, right?
But imagine that these people who are watching this Scott Wiener video were
also reading the new UN report that just came out about what Israel has done to
Palestinian children. I’m just gonna quote a couple of things from this UN
report, because I just think it reminds us, again, as if we need reminding, of
the utter horror of what Israel has done, horror that normal people will
understandably respond to with grave anger. Again, doesn’t mean they should be
assholes about it, but anger is an understandable reaction to the kinds of
things that this UN report finds.
This UN report is based on a huge amount of evidence, of documentary evidence,
of interviews with medical workers, with Palestinians themselves, with
journalists, with lawyers, huge amount of documentation. By the way, it also
does mention violence against Israeli children on October 7th. It also, the
writers of this report gave Israel, I think 13 times they asked Israel to
respond to some of the claims in this report, but Israel didn’t respond to any
of them because Israel never responds to these things. It never actually
engages with the evidence that the UN or human rights groups create. It
basically just ignores them and then denounces these reports as kind of
antisemitic blood libels, right?
The report finds that Israel has killed at least 20,000 children in Gaza since
October 7th, injured at least 44,000. Of the children it’s killed, at least
5,000 were under the age of 5. It’s killed more than 5,000 children under the
age of 5, and more than 1,000 children under the age of 1. The report quotes an
NGO, Save the Children, as suggesting that there may be even more than 5,000
children in Gaza who were buried under the rubble, whose bodies could not even
be found by their families.
It mentions that Israel dropped so many bombs in Gaza, and a percentage of
these bombs don’t go off until, you know, at the time, right? So that 5-10% of
them don’t go off, so that within the 61 million tons of debris that exist in
Gaza, you have thousands and thousands of, maybe tens of thousands of
unexploded ordinances that children in Gaza will be encountering for years and
decades to come, especially because Israel isn’t allowing no reconstruction in
Gaza, because it’s not allowing any heavy machinery in that would allow people
to actually go through this debris and maybe make it a little bit less
dangerous.
They mention in this report that at least 10,000 children in Gaza have lost
their hearing as a result of Israel’s attacks, that more than 1,000 children
have had their limbs amputated. Many of those amputations were done without
anesthesia because Israel so destroyed the medical system. That there’s more
child amputees in Gaza per capita than any other place on the face of the earth.
And this killing has not stopped. It’s continuing even after the so-called
ceasefire, in part because Israel has established this yellow line and
basically shoots people who cross onto the wrong side of the yellow line. But
the report notes that the yellow line is not clearly demarcated. It’s often
shifting. And so, you have a situation in which at least 100 children since
just this January have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
And they also find real evidence of targeted killing of children. The
commission interviews 17 medical practitioners in different hospitals, and they
find that these medical practitioners reported ‘a consistent pattern of
receiving children with single gunshot wounds either by quadcopters or snipers.
The killing of a child from a single gunshot wound indicates a high degree of
precision in the use of force, suggesting that the shot was carefully aimed
rather than incidental or the result of indiscriminate fire.’
And I know Israel’s supporters would say, why would Israel ever do that, right?
I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it. The point is that when you have
mass dehumanization of a population, as you have had with Palestinians for
decades, and especially after October 7th, and when you have virtual total
impunity among soldiers, again, reared in that culture of dehumanization, also
enraged by what Hamas and others did on October 7th, and they know that there’s
going to be impunity, these kind of things happen. They happen in every army,
but in particular, in this case, you have it at an extraordinary scale because
of the degree of the dehumanization, and the fact that you have a completely
defenseless population in Gaza, and so you have the targeted killing of
children.
It’s also worth remembering that all of this is taking place in the context in
which Israeli leaders have repeatedly said that what they would like in Gaza is
for Palestinians to leave. The Israeli defense minister said this very
recently, that Israel’s policy is ‘voluntary migration.’ Voluntary, right? You
basically make the place completely uninhabitable, and then you say, ‘I think
it would be great if you went somewhere else, we’ll help you go somewhere
else,’ right? And in those contexts, terror towards the population incentivizes
people to leave.
If people who watch that Scott Wiener video would also read this UN report, it
wouldn’t, I think, make them believe that it’s right to act like an asshole, or
it’s wise to act like an asshole, but it might allow them to understand this
kind of rage, which is so bewildering to so many pro-Israel Jews, that they
can’t imagine it could come from any other force other than the kind of
historical recesses of antisemitism, which have now just bubbled up back up to
the surface.
The thing that I think people in the pro-Israel world don’t understand, or they
won’t face, is that just because they are turning a blind eye and
systematically not looking carefully at what Israel is doing to Palestinians,
it doesn’t mean that other people aren’t looking. Other people are looking. And
those other people therefore feel a sense of anger, even rage, at what Israel’s
doing because it’s not pathological to respond to a situation where Israel has
killed 5,000 children under the age of 5 and be angry about it. That’s a pretty
normal, I would say, healthy human reaction. And it doesn’t require any degree
of antisemitism to have that anger, even that rage.
But when Israel’s supporters in the Jewish community don’t look at any of these
things themselves, they can’t understand the rage as coming from any other
place than antisemitism. And we can recognize that there are good ways to
deploy that rage, constructive and decent ways to convey that rage, and ways
that are counterproductive and that are nasty and vicious, and ones that we
shouldn’t support.
But understanding the reasons for the rage I think is the beginning of
understanding how we can get to a place where we don’t have politicians being
treated like Scott Wiener was, but more importantly—more importantly, far more
importantly—we don’t have Palestinian children being slaughtered like this.
Because if you’re upset at the assault on Scott Wiener’s dignity that you see
in these videos, surely you should be a hundred, a thousand, a million times
more upset at the mass destruction of human life that Israel has committed in
Gaza.
If you can’t understand that, it seems to me, then you’ve completely lost the
plot. And my worry is that people, because they turn away again and again and
again from looking in the eye what Israel is doing, they can’t have a rational
diagnosis for the anger, indeed the rage, that we see reflected at Israel and
Israel’s supporters today.
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© 2026 Peter Beinart
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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