Dan and Brad provide thoughts on the news from Israel and reflect on what its implications here in the USA.
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I'm the professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I am flying solo today.
Brad had a family event taking place, but we are going to spend a lot of time talking about the events in Israel today—fair stage.
It's going to be sort of a heavy day for that regard.
And he did record a piece that he wanted to still share with folks.
So I'm going to throw it over to that for a minute, and then it'll come back to me.
Hey, y'all.
As Dan said, I am out today doing a funeral for a family member, and so I'm not with you.
But I did record this ahead of time just because I had some thoughts I wanted to share about what's happening in Israel and in Gaza.
and around the region.
We're not a show that is about foreign policy.
We are about Christian nationalism.
We focus on the United States and North America broadly, but really the United States.
Neither Dan or I are experts on Middle East politics or history.
We are not those who have the kinds of specialized training to feel as if we can comment on these things from a scholarly point of view.
What I can say is that, like many of you, I've been just Thinking about what's happening since it all began.
I've been seeing so many social media posts and messages and I just want to come back to something that we talk a lot about on this show and I think really pertains to this case.
It is really tempting.
In the kinds of high demand religions and fundamentalisms that we discuss often to reduce the world to either or, to a binary.
And I think also in cases like this, it feels as if we have to take a side.
We're on social media.
We see various people posting and various news bits and pieces of information come through.
And our reaction is that we need to make sure that we're on the right side and we need to express our anger the right way and for everyone to see that.
And I understand that.
I do that too.
I'm not judging that.
I'm not saying that I'm above that.
But I think in this case, one of the things that we can fall into is an either-or thinking.
And before you jump to any conclusions about what I'm saying, just hear me out for one minute.
It's pretty clear.
I don't think there's any doubting that the actions of Hamas in this case are immeasurably violent and really, really evil.
The attacks on innocent people in broad daylight, the capturing of prisoners and the ways they've treated them.
I'm sure most of you have understood all of what's happened there and have digested some of that news, so I'm not going to go into it in detail.
It is completely clear to me that those actions are morally reprehensible and in many ways unthinkable.
I think it is also possible to realize that Hamas does not represent, that Hamas is not all of Palestine or all Palestinians, that there are many Palestinians who are not supporters of Hamas, not supporters of these actions, that they are like you.
They are people doing their best to get through the day, living in what are difficult circumstances to say the least.
Raising their children, trying to get them to school, trying to have the best life possible, and so on.
I think it is possible to hold those two things at once, that Hamas and its actions are morally reprehensible and deserving of condemnation, while also recognizing that Hamas is not Palestine.
Hamas is not all of Palestinians.
I lived in the UK during the late years of the George W. Bush presidency, and almost every time I left the house, I'd run into someone who'd say, Oh, you're American.
I hate George W. Bush.
What's wrong with you?
And this would lead to discussions most of the time, sometimes arguments about how, yes, I am American, but I don't actually stand for the things that George W. Bush is doing in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Iraq.
I'm not an American who thinks that all of that's a good idea.
And I can tell you all the other things that you think about Americans that actually don't represent who I am.
And what I was trying to do there in a very different circumstance is say, yes, I am American, but please don't think that George W. Bush and his actions in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else represent our collective sense of the world and what we want.
So I just want to say, I think it's possible to say, yes, what Hamas has done is without a doubt, without hesitation, morally reprehensible and condemnable, while also recognizing that there are innocents in Palestine
And that the reaction to this set of attacks by Hamas to simply wage all-out war on Gaza, on Palestinians, to try to end the Palestinian people, to take action that says this is complete war without regard for children, for people who are innocent, for the elderly and so on.
That is also morally reprehensible.
And so we can hold more than one thing at once.
We can do that.
We can think in a complex way.
We can sympathize and remember and reflect on the pain of the Israeli families, the Israeli communities, the Israeli people who have been affected, who have been captured, who have been killed.
That is just devastating, difficult, catastrophic news.
We can do that.
We can remember them, we can reflect on their lives, we can reflect on how this is not okay and this is not a world we want to live in.
We can do that without thinking that the response, the only response, is to then try to level the same kind of attacks on Palestinian children, on Palestinian innocents, people who have no part in what Hamas is doing.
That's all I wanted to say about this.
I see so much around the web that's basically, you're either pro-Palestine or pro-Israel.
You are either pro-good or pro-evil.
You are either for right or for not.
And what I'm trying to say is, There's a long history here.
There are intense entanglements, webs of politics and religion that have to be entangled.
We're not going to do that on this show.
We don't feel like we're equipped to make those kinds of analyses in a way that we would feel is responsible.
But what I am saying is that we don't have to fall into either-or thinking, that we can recognize that there are just Immeasurable sets of pain and tragedy in Israel right now.
Israeli families, Israeli communities who are going through something that no human should ever have to go through.
We can also recognize that the only response to that does not have to be Thinking that Hamas represents every last Palestinian child and innocent who exists in Gaza or the West Bank or anywhere else, those things can be held in tandem.
And we can recognize that attempted genocide either way, that trying to create a situation where one people group no longer exists, Or terrorist attacks on children, on teenagers, on people at bus stops and at nightclubs is also morally reprehensible.
So that's my thought for today.
I'll throw it back to Dan.
Okay.
So, as I say, big events this week.
The events that have rocked the world have been the attacks on Israelis by Hamas actors and the ongoing response by the State of Israel to that.
And, you know, I've spent a lot of the time this week thinking about this, as we all have, and I think a lot of my thoughts will dovetail some with what Brad had to say.
Being an academic doesn't necessarily train you for a lot of real-world stuff.
We are famously known for being in the ivory tower and not always as engaged as, in my view, we ought to be with things that are going on around us.
It's one of the reasons we do this podcast.
But one thing that I think it can help with is it helps you develop A way to or sort of training to try to retain a kind of critical or analytic perspective on things, even things that can be really emotional.
And it's not to say that you don't feel and you don't feel deeply.
I feel the same thing that so many others feel.
I feel anger and sorrow and fear and confusion.
But one of the things that has really settled on me this week, I think, is the need to not act Because we are overwhelmed by those emotions, the need to be able to, yeah, feel those emotions, feel all those things, let them impact us, but not to be overwhelmed by them in such a way that That it drowns out everything else.
And I bring that up because I think it gets to the heart of the concerns that I have kind of moving forward.
And we're going to share those in just a second here.
I don't think, to reflect on what Brad said about people wanting to be on the right side, I don't think there is a right side in this in any straightforward way.
Or maybe the better thing to say is that for me, the right side, if you want to be on the right side, I think the right side is always with the non-combatants.
It's always with the ordinary people who get crushed or trampled by whatever's going on.
And we talk about this not in the sense of literal conflict, but even in the sense of policies and their effects on people.
Regular people, ordinary, regular people who are affected by the things that Politicians or policymakers or others do.
I think it's a safe bet to say that if you want to be on the right side, be on the side of those folks.
And that's one of the things, again, that I think we try to do here is we try to be a voice for that side.
And as Brad said, in this context, we're talking about the regular people who are trying to live their lives.
And here's the thing.
The people who were targeted by Hamas, they were also not combatants.
They weren't the people who set and enforce Israeli policies toward the Palestinians that are involved in all of this.
And the actions were absolutely brutal and violent and diabolical.
And in my view, there is no defense for them.
Nothing in that statement is intended to minimize real concerns about the plight of the Palestinians, a plight that humanitarians have raised for decades.
None of it is meant to take away from that.
And my concern there has always been the same.
As I've reflected this week, I think I've tried to maintain a consistent concern About the ordinary people trying to live their lives every day, whether they're Palestinians, whether they're Israelis, whatever context we're in, that's the concern.
And I think this is my issue when we talk about being right or having the right perspective or the right response.
This would be my statement.
The right response to people suffering in pain should never be to make other people suffer or feel pain in reprisal.
And that's what I think happened here.
There has been real pain for the Palestinian people.
And I think, among other things, this is an effort to inflict pain and suffering on those who are perceived to have inflicted pain and suffering on them.
And I don't think that's ever right.
Ever.
Not in any context.
It's all too common in our world, and I think it should be condemned wherever and whenever we see it, no matter who the actors are.
That's where I think I am with this.
And that brings me to the concern that I have ongoing with this, which is, you know, I think Hamas and its actors absolutely deserve our condemnation.
We're going to talk about that more as we go through the rest of this episode.
But I worry.
I worry a lot whenever military force is unleashed with the rhetoric of punishment.
Or vengeance or wrath.
And this is the rhetoric we've heard from the state of Israel about, you know, punishing and having retribution and wrath.
I fear it's a recipe for disaster.
I fear that it can tip from protecting people, protecting those regular people from violent acts, it can tip into trying to inflict suffering and pain in retribution for the suffering and pain that was inflicted.
That's the concern that I have.
I worry when a militarily powerful state harnesses corporate feelings of rage and sorrow to craft military policy.
I worried about that after 9-11, and I think we saw that play out in lots of different ways.
I worry about it here.
Excuse me.
And that's why I would, as I reflect on this, join absolutely in unqualified condemnation of the acts that were undertaken by Hamas.
But I would also join with people like Secretary of State Blinken and the French President Macron, who warned Israel that its response to the actions of Hamas have to be fair.
Macron said this, he said, quote, "Israel has the right to defend itself by eliminating terrorist groups such as Hamas through targeted action, but preserving civilian population is the duty of democracies.
The only response to terrorism is always a strong and fair one, strong because fair." End quote.
That part where he says, you know, preserving civilian populations is the duty of democracies, I believe that.
When I talk about the noncombatants, that's what I'm after.
Secretary Blinken, standing alongside Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference, said, quote, That's my concern, sort of moving forward, is what happens to all of those regular people.
And this goes directly to Brad's point that the Palestinians as a whole are not Hamas.
Hamas is not every Palestinian.
Just as the people who were attacked and killed and kidnapped by Hamas, they're not the Israeli government, they're not the Israeli military, they are not the people who can change Israeli policies and so forth, right?
I see today, I saw the news that Israel has warned over a million people to leave northern Gaza.
Observers think that they're preparing for a ground incursion.
The UN says that that's impossible without significant humanitarian consequences.
There will be huge humanitarian consequences if that happens, and lots of people, including the UN, have noted that Gaza is on the verge of collapse already.
This is the question I have, and this is the challenge that I would have if anybody was listening to me.
The challenge I would have, not just for Israel, But for Israel's allies and the rest of the world is, how will they meet and address those consequences?
How will they protect the real, regular, ordinary people who are going to be impacted by this?
That, for me, is what keeps me up at night, is the plight of the noncombatants and the regular people, right?
So that's sort of where I'm at with this.
When I say there's no right side, what I mean is I don't think this comes down cleanly on Israel versus Palestine, because constantly, always, in the long history of the issues that go on with these populations, I think, and I think this is historically true everywhere, it's the regular people who've suffered.
The people who can do the least about what is happening to them suffer the most, and that is Again, advocating for those people is the right thing.
I think this is a situation where it's very difficult to know how to do that.
I'm not a specialist in Mideastern religion or politics.
But those are my thoughts, for whatever they're worth.
Take a break here for just a second.
And then I want to shift to something I think we do know more about on the show, which is politics and religion in the United States.
And we're going to have some reflections on how the events in Israel related to Hamas, I think are roiling and revealing lots of things about American politics.
Be right back.
Okay, so let's start with the GOP, the fractious GOP.
No matter where you stand on the politics of Israel-Palestine, I think these events demonstrate some of the real-world effects of American Christian nationalism on the GOP, right?
This, of course, is the main theme that we talk about all the time.
And it's not something that I feel like lots of analysts have sort of front and center this week, looking at specifically how Christian nationalism is affecting and influencing these things.
But I think it's real.
I think it's a real thing that's at work.
And we've talked on this podcast for years about how the contemporary GOP, as an embodiment of Christian nationalism, is not interested in governing.
Now, I've been saying this since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, and since the GOP took both houses of Congress.
This is not something new.
What are they interested in?
They have been interested in culture war.
They have been interested in the punishment of their opponents, right?
This goes back to the point that I made before, earlier, right?
That they have perceived themselves to be under threat or be punished or persecuted or whatever, and their response is not just to remedy that, it is to punish and persecute others, right?
That's what they're interested in.
That's what we talk about all the time.
And they do this at the aim of crafting the Christian nation that they imagine.
Again, we talk about this all the time.
So we saw this.
We saw this.
We talked about it with Kevin McCarthy having to make concessions to win the Speaker of the House that basically made it an empty office, right?
We talked about this months ago.
Emptied the office of any real significance or import or power.
And we saw it in what we described, I think it was last week, in nihilistic efforts to remove him.
Because why was he removed?
He was removed for avoiding a government shutdown by working with Democrats.
A kind of political nihilism, a political doctrine where the only real doctrine is you oppose your enemies.
That's it.
There's nothing positive there.
We see it now as they apparently have no path forward to replace him, right?
Gates made the move to have him replaced.
Enough GOP House members voted to remove him.
There's no strategy.
No strategy beyond moving him again.
Purely negative.
Nihilistic practice.
Nothing positive behind it.
Steve Scalise dropped his bid to be the next speaker because he couldn't win the support he needed.
Talk now about the attention turning back to Jim Jordan, but there's no evidence he can win enough support that he can unite the GOP.
And why does all that matter?
How does it relate to this?
Because all of this is going on despite the attack against Israel by Hamas.
In the very recent past, right, and I think you don't have to be as old as I am to remember this past, just a few years ago, I think it was unimaginable that House Republicans would not have been walking in lockstep in hawkish support for Israel against Hamas.
I think that would have just been a no-brainer.
It would have been a unifying moment for the GOP.
But now, now when it's time to govern, and again, I'm not saying that the GOP was in power and really governing that I would support their policies.
I'm positive that I would not.
Okay?
But they would at least be trying to govern.
They would enact some vision of what the international order should be and the U.S.
role in it and how to respond to Hamas and so forth.
But instead, even in the face of this, when it's time to govern, they still can't unite.
I think it also highlights the isolationism of the contemporary GOP.
I think the America-first nationalism that governs it is also an America-alone and isolated nationalism, a we-only-care-about-what-happens-here kind of nationalism, and I think that that's reflected in all the culture war stuff.
That the GOP will put more energy into trying to ban gender-affirming care for minors, or make sure that you can't, I don't know, read about Anne Frank's sexuality in grade middle school, or whatever, than in naming a Speaker of the House and undertaking their legislative responsibility to help govern the country.
Right?
I think that that's really, really telling.
And I think that, I think those more conservative voices in the GOP, and I know that they're there, the ones that decry the lack of American leadership at present, I think they see this, they know this, and what we're seeing is that this America first, it's in their view, it's making America last.
I am not a fan of American intervention all over the world.
I do not believe the purpose of the American state, the U.S.
state, should be to assert its preeminence everywhere.
But if I'm putting on my hat and trying to sort of think about what I think a Republican response would have been in the recent past, it's radically different.
And that says a great deal to me about The priorities and the ethos of the GOP as a Christian nationalist party.
And I think the fact that there isn't a unifying factor around this, the fact that those traditional conservative voices and conservative positions aren't winning people over, I think, again, that reinforces the point, we make it all the time, that I think that they are not the so-called heart of the GOP.
I still hear the folks who want to talk about the GOP As if this is a, I don't know, a phase that's not real in some way, as if there really is this great massive number of traditional conservatives, or more moderate members, more moderate compared to the far right, or whatever.
I just don't think it's the case.
Or at least they don't have the political sway to do anything about this.
So that's one of the first takeaways about all of this.
But we're going to talk about the GOP, and we're going to talk about the response to Israel, we're going to talk about America first, and it's going to lead us right into MAGA Nation stuff, right?
It's going to come down to Trump.
And we have to come, uncomfortably but not unnaturally, to Trump once again.
Um, because he, of course, rose to power on a kind of isolationist, nationalist, America First message.
We talk about his authoritarian tendencies and fantasies that come with this, that his vision of I was going to say governing.
It's not governing.
Ruling a kind of America First Nation is authoritarian in nature.
I think we've seen this over and over and over.
And the events in the House this week, last couple weeks, and in the wake of the Israel-Hamas crisis, they illustrate what this looks like.
And I think that this is worth noting as well, right?
Because as always, Trump's vision has been one of self-aggrandizing power and not leadership or governance.
This is clear by now.
That's what he wants out of the presidency.
It's not about serving anybody.
It's not about governing.
It's about ruling.
It's about winning over people and enforcing conformity to one's views and so forth.
And he's made no move at all to help the House coalesce around a Speaker candidate.
In other words, as this crisis is going on, I think he could have, I think lots of other people would have, if they were able, played a role in helping to settle the House on somebody who could be Speaker so the business of the American people could be done again.
He's made no move to do that.
He initially endorsed Jordan, but he really hasn't done anything since.
He certainly has not gone out of his way to say, Scalise stepped aside, it's time for everybody to unite around Jim Jordan and so forth.
And I think the issue is that he has no interest in actually being the leader of a party of which he views himself as the head.
He wants to be the authority.
He's not serving a party.
He's not serving anybody else.
Right?
And by way of contrast to that, by way of contrast to leadership, what does Trump do this week?
He uses the events to, among other things, continue to peddle his election conspiracies about the 2020 election.
He claimed that if the election hadn't been rigged, he'd be president, and it would never have happened.
So much in that statement that we see, the ongoing claims that the election was stolen, despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite the fact that he's under indictment at this point for exactly those claims and the actions supporting them, on and on and on and on.
The self-aggrandizing, counterfactual claim that if I'd been president, this never would have happened, as if the U.S.
president has anything to do with these kinds of events.
He also took the opportunity, though, to air his personal grievances against Netanyahu, and he, at the same time, decided to praise Hezbollah militants.
So, again, we see that at the top of this sort of pyramidal Christian nationalist party is this figure who doesn't even care about the party itself.
He only cares about him.
He wants power for Donald Trump, and he sees American power and a vision of America first as Donald Trump first at whatever is in his interest, right?
So again, regardless of our political views on Israel, I want to be clear again, right?
If Trump was helping the House to coalesce around a Speaker candidate, it's not going to be a Speaker candidate I would support.
If the Republicans had a well-ordered House and were taking action, I'm almost positive there would be policy proposals and actions going forward with which I vehemently disagree, right?
But regardless of our political views on Israel, I think what Trump's responses Responses uttered by the undisputed frontrunner to be the 2024 GOP presidential candidate.
I think that his responses illustrate the priorities of his authoritarian personality.
And this, I think, flows down into everything else.
This is why he was elected.
Is because he fits so well with the ethos of what has become the Christian Nationalist Party in America that is only interested in punishing enemies, in rewarding allies, in gaining power, and so forth.
So, to sum all that up, my first set of reflections is that the GOP dysfunction has been on display for a long time.
And I think it's magnified by the events of the last week.
They have not created it.
They haven't done anything new with it.
But I think it's more on display even than it has been because this massive crisis, crisis of multiple dimensions, humanitarian crisis, political crisis, you name it, unfolds and they just have no answer.
And for me, these things are related in really direct ways to the transformations of the GOP in recent years.
And I think the final point, I say it all the time, and folks, I'm sorry if you're tired of hearing it, but as long as people keep emailing me or talking to me or reaching out to me and saying, you talk about Christian nationalism all the time.
You say the GOP is a Christian nationalist party.
It's not.
There are lots and lots of conservatives.
They don't speak for all of us.
I get it.
I get that they don't speak for all of you.
But the traditional conservatives simply don't really have a seat at the table right now.
They're certainly not the ones calling the shots, let alone the moderates.
Somebody who would be anywhere near the political middle.
And I think at some point, I don't know what it's going to take to disabuse people of that notion.
I think it's scary to think that there's a Christian nationalist party that's one of the two main parties in this country.
But there is, and again, that's on full display for me this week as we see what's unfolding in Israel.
If that's the GOP, I want to be equal opportunity here and talk about how the events in Israel are also, I think, revealing a lot of sort of conflicted positions for liberals and progressives as well.
We've seen Democrats, liberals, and progressives having to do a lot of soul-searching over the past few days.
I'd put myself in that same category in a lot of ways.
So again, once upon a time, not that long ago, unwavering support for the State of Israel and its policies toward, among other things, the Palestinians, it was something American politicians of both parties largely had in common.
You might have had battles between Democrats and Republicans on all kinds of things.
But support for Israel, especially in the face of a massively brutal, violent, orchestrated and coordinated attack like this one, that wouldn't have been an issue of debate.
I think there would have been a lot of unity about supporting Israel in sort of whatever way was necessary.
In recent years, that has shifted, right?
You've had, if we're talking about political actors and Democrats, you've had a new generation of Democrats that have been more critical of Israel's policies.
And I think especially as Israel's government has drifted more and more toward their own extreme right, if you follow Israeli politics, I'm not an expert in it, but I follow it, you've known that for years, Netanyahu, to hold onto power amid all of his own legal and political scandals and so forth, Has had to cobble together these complex coalition governments, and he has had to bring together more and more extreme actors from the Israeli right.
So as they have moved further and further to the ideological right in Israel, you've seen among other liberals and progressives in the U.S.
and other places, beginning to be more critical of The actions of the Israeli state when it comes to things like Palestine, the occupied territories, and so forth.
Now, I want to be really clear.
I think we need to say this.
That's not to say that there's some criticism of the Jewish people or an opposition to Judaism.
It's not about Judaism, right?
It's about the actions of a state, of a political state, toward those over whom it exercises some kind of authority.
So, you've seen this shift And I think it's accompanied outside of the explicitly political sphere that is beyond political actors, beyond political parties and so forth.
You see this, excuse me, as especially young left-leaning Americans have also been increasingly and extremely critical of Israel's policy and broad support for the cause of the Palestinians.
So, in other words, you've seen more and more criticism of the treatment of Israel, excuse me, of the Palestinians by Israel of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians and so forth.
So much so that in a pretty broad swath among liberals and Democrats and certainly among progressives, it has become just sort of a presumption of opposing Israeli policy and supporting the Palestinians.
And I think many of those on the left are now struggling to reassess this week because And we've seen this.
We've seen this coming from politicians.
We've seen it in rallies that have been held.
We've seen it in statements that people have issued.
We've seen it all over.
I think that we're seeing a kind of soul searching and a kind of reassessment taking place.
And I think that there probably was no better illustration of this if we're talking about a kind of popular sphere or a sphere beyond the bounds of the narrowly political or political parties than the controversy that's been going on at Harvard over the past week.
And many of you will have read that.
I'm not going to rehash all of this.
But the long and short of it was there's a coalition of student groups at Harvard that released a joint statement or what they called a joint statement.
Excuse me.
On the events of Israel in Gaza, and it read in part, right, this is a quote, it read, we, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli government solely responsible for all unfolding violence, end quote.
And again, let me read that again, let's just pause with those words, hold the Israeli government solely responsible for all unfolding violence, okay?
This immediately ignited a firestorm, as we knew that it would.
People on the right clearly were going to oppose this.
A group of CEOs called for blacklisting the signatories.
The signatories were secret.
It wasn't clear who they were.
They wanted them named and had this whole thing about how they were going to make sure to never hire them and so forth.
A conservative group chartered a billboard bus to advertise who some of the signatories were.
And even groups that opposed this statement, you know, came out against this act as a potential something that could threaten the well-being of the people who signed this statement.
But what interests me is the fact that this statement brought to light a lot of that real soul-searching going on among those who prior to this, I think, would simply have assumed that to support The Palestinians and those who are supposed to be acting on behalf of the Palestinians, like Hamas.
Was, quote-unquote, the right position, right?
To get back to that language that we opened with.
But many who have been critical of Israel's policies, they decried this statement as sort of misguided at best and morally abhorrent at worst.
And I want to say again, we, the undersigned student organization, hold the Israeli government solely responsible for all unfolding violence.
That means solely responsible for the actors who went in and slaughtered and kidnapped non-combatants.
I'm not ignorant of the history of Israel and Palestine and the debates around it, and I could talk a lot more than I'm going to today about some of the background to that, but I don't think it alleviates the people who went in and butchered civilians, kidnapped civilians.
I don't think it alleviates them a responsibility for doing that, right?
As I said before, That's sort of my opening.
I don't think that the right response to suffering and mistreatment can ever be to make others suffer and experience mistreatment in retribution.
And that's what this was, right?
So a lot of people on the left came out against this statement.
Many of the student groups distanced themselves from the statement.
Many of them said that they hadn't actually read it when they signed it.
Members of those groups, individual members, said that often that they knew nothing about it when their leadership said, yeah, sign our name up.
Others have pointed out, and this is not completely unfair, I don't think it completely exonerates the people who did this, but sometimes college students get very idealistic and jump onto things and maybe read stuff before you sign it.
It's like sending the email when you're really angry and you type it up.
Maybe let it sit in your draft box overnight and read it again in the morning.
Don't sign statements unless you've read them.
College students are not always the most reflective actors in the world.
The point is, for me, this debate, the statement, the knee-jerk reaction that I think it represented, the kind of unreflective Immediate response, the blind support for it on the part of certain student groups, but then the backlash against it on the part of other liberals and progressives, some of those student groups taking a closer look and saying, oh my gosh, that's not what I meant to say, backing off from that.
I think it illustrates so much of what I'm describing as this kind of soul-searching going on Or being provoked within the political left as a result of the things going on in Israel and Gaza as well.
So what's the takeaway for me?
I want to come back to the point that Brad made, that we want to be on the right side, but what happens when there isn't a clear one?
Right?
This is one of those cases.
What happens when the social and political reality is really, really complicated?
And here I'm not just talking about this event.
I am talking about the whole nexus of this event.
I'm talking about past years and decades that have moved toward this point.
What happens when it's not easy to say or to draw a straight line of right and wrong and who's good and who's bad and who's evil and who's virtuous or whatever?
Is it possible?
To be critical of Israel's years-long policies and to acknowledge the atrocious nature of the Hamas attacks?
Of course it is.
It absolutely is.
I want to be really clear about that.
I think one of the problems that people have, including a lot of ideological purists on the left, same as on the right, is a reluctance to acknowledge The things can be messy and complicated and it turned things into a zero-sum game.
That either you support this group or you support that group without understanding that both can be true at the same time.
That you can oppose Israeli policies and the consequences that they have wrought and you can oppose what Hamas has been doing.
I think in the long view, there are lots of actors that share responsibility for bringing us to this point.
I think it's far too simple to simply say, Israel's responsible for these people coming in and killing a bunch of Israelis.
I think it's also irresponsible and simplistic to pretend that We have no idea why this happened or that, you know, maybe if there were two states and maybe if the Palestinians had strong political organizations that, you know, they could go in and represent themselves and so forth.
I don't know.
Would this have happened?
I don't know if it would, right?
Those are big questions.
They're questions that are bigger than we have time for.
They're questions that go beyond my expertise.
But what I'm getting at is life is messy and we have to, all of us, get past either-or thinking.
This is another thing we talk about on this podcast all the time.
We're often talking about people on the right.
We're often talking about Christian nationalism.
But that habit of either-or thinking, it's a habit we all need to break.
And so I think that this is a key idea.
And I think that this is something that liberals and progressives are confronting the complexity of.
And frankly, as a college professor, I think this is something that those students at Harvard are confronting.
That kind of energetic idealism has its place, but it also has its limitations, and I think they're running up against some of those.
So, to circle back around to my opening comments, I'm going to cite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC.
She issued a statement, and I just want to read it.
She said on the day that this happened, she wrote, "Today is devastating for all those seeking a lasting peace and respect for human rights in Israel and Palestine.
I condemn Hamas's attack in the strongest possible terms.
No child and family should ever endure this kind of violence and fear, and this violence will not solve the ongoing oppression and occupation in the region.
An immediate ceasefire and de-escalation is urgently needed to save lives.
I'm with her, right?
Again, hear what she says, right?
Lasting peace and respect for human rights if we're concerned about the real people The people who suffer, ordinary people, we can't be okay, we can't justify, we can't absolve Hamas for these actions.
And as she said, no child and family should endure this.
She talks about human rights, both in Israel and Palestine, and said that violence will not solve the ongoing oppression and occupation in the region.
I think she's right on all counts.
Hamas undertaking this action, for whatever reasons they had, they are going to make the lives of Palestinians worse.
And I think that that's an unfortunate fact as well.
I hope, if we're going to come to a reason for hope, it's hard to do this week, but if I try to look for reasons to hope, I'm going to come back to that opening point that I made.
I take hope in the fact that political allies of Israel, influential and significant political allies, are calling for a measured, appropriate response to this.
I hope it can stave off the worst possibilities as this conflict unfolds.
I hope that.
Friends, I am not sure of that.
I unfortunately am not confident in that, but I hope for that.
And I do take hope in the fact that the United Nations is highlighting what the humanitarian cost of a massive forced evacuation of Gaza will be.
I take hope in people like the British Prime Minister and the French President and the U.S.
State Department and President Biden.
Telling Israel that there needs to be a measured and appropriate response to this.
I take hope in it.
A dark week, heavy week.
I'm sorry for that.
We, on the Weekly Roundup, you know, we sort of have to talk about what the world gives us, and this, unfortunately, is what the world gave us.
I want to thank you all for listening.
As always, we can't do it without you.
All the patrons, those of you who listen to the ads, those of you who support us in so many different ways, thank you.
Please keep listening.
Tell your friends about us.
If you have the ability to support us financially, please do so.
Again, we're Indie-funded.
We put content out multiple times a week.
We don't have any help for doing that.
This is something we do because we care about it and we hear from all of you.
Please, always feel free to reach out to me, Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
We'll be back with content next week, the materials that Brad does, it's in the code, the weekly roundup.
I don't even know what to say, folks.
It's a hard week.
Thank you for listening.
Please don't lose hope and let us hear from you.
I think if there's nothing else that we take away from this on this sort of individual level, it's the importance of hearing from one another, being there to support one another, being there to support the people suffering these atrocities from a distance.
