Israel and Gaza Today

What do you say when any words will cause pain?

I recognize that you might see this title and think, “I can’t.” Or you might press play with trepidation, feeling something like “I hope they don’t hurt me in this next hour.” Those are fair reactions.

At the top of today’s episode, you’ll hear Sarah say that we’ve not talked about Israel and Gaza for a few months because we haven’t known what to say. We take a moment of silence before we start talking on air to underscore the point.

It is the sincere hope of my heart that, wherever you come from and whatever else you take from this episode, you hear months of contemplation, learning, listening, and intention in this discussion.

We will not be clipping this episode for social media sharing. We will not open our social media channels for discussion on this episode because this is a long-form conversation, and that’s the only way it can be. We have been quietly talking with listeners over these past few months, and we intend to continue doing so. If you are willing to take the risk of pressing play, we welcome your perspective with open minds. If you’re a premium member, you can comment on Substack, and all are welcome to email us. Thank you for being here. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• How Our Perspectives Have Shifted Since October 7th

• America's Role and Influence in the Conflict

• Outside of Politics: Summer Reading Recommendations

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics

• Save money on your annual Pantsuit Politics Premium Subscription with our summer sale

Israel & Gaza

• I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. (The New York Times)

• Israel bombards Gaza City ahead of planned offensive (Reuters)

• Israel says it has taken first steps of military operation in Gaza City (Reuters)

• Hamas accepts proposed deal for ceasefire with Israel and hostage release, Egyptian source says (Reuters)

• Israel's growing frustration over the war in Gaza erupts in nationwide protests (The Washington Post)

• Why the laws of war are widely ignored (The Economist)

• Standing Together

• A Land for All

Outside of Politics: Summer Reading

• By Plane or By Page (Sarah’s Substack with the First Books Book Club)

• "How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States" by Daniel Immerwahr

• "Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story" by Julie K. Brown

• "What Is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics" by Adam Becker

• "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" by David T. Courtwright

• "Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future" by Greg Beato and Reid Hoffman

• "How to Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative" by Austin Kleon

• "Shark Heart: A Love Story" by Emily Habeck

• "The God of the Woods" by Liz Moore

• "The Wedding People" by Alison Espach

• "May the Wolf Die" by Elizabeth Heider

  • Sarah’s interview with Elizabeth!

• "The Hunt for Red October" by Tom Clancy

• “Great Big Beautiful Life” by Emily Henry

• "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers

• "The Optimist's Daughter" by Eudora Welty

• "Tell Me Everything" by Elizabeth Strout

• “The Black Wolf” by Louise Penny

Habits of the Heart Slow Read

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:08] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:10] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:11] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics. It has been over five months since we have spoken about Gaza on the show. We can offer a litany of reasons. The news won't stop. The summer is hard. But really, it's because we didn't know what to say. What do you say when you know no matter what you say, it will cause pain to someone? We can't condemn Israel strongly enough for some and we can't defend Israel strongly enough for others. This isn't just a sensitive topic. It is a gaping wound in the side of the human race. Some of us might do a better job of others than avoiding it, but we are all affected.

Beth [00:00:59] But we do need to talk about it. And we are asking everyone listening to the sound of our voices right now to hear us say, all we can do is try. We're going to try to talk about the situation in Gaza. And instead of doing our usual before we get started dance today, we're just going to reserve that time on the advice of a beloved listener for all of us to take a deep breath and ground ourselves as best we can and embrace the next moments of silence before we start to fill them with words, knowing from the beginning, that our words will not be enough.

Sarah [00:01:59] Beth, I was struck by the realization that there's not even an agreed upon entry into this conversation. Usually in a conflict, you would speak about the consequences of the conflict, the loss involved in the conflict. You would cite the 62,000 Palestinians, including 18,403 children who have been killed. Or you would talk about the 1,200 Israelis who were killed on October 7th. But the problem is that not everyone agrees with what we're talking about here as beginning on October seventh. And I think that that's not a hard case to make, that this is a longer, more difficult conflict that has been going on for decades that makes even the last two years, the last two months, the last weeks incredibly difficult to analyze or draw some sort of boundary around.

Beth [00:03:06] In preparation for this conversation, I went again through just a timeline of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians going back to the drawing of the current state of Israel. And I decided I'm never going to talk about this again without marching through that timeline. First, just to remind myself, you don't have to have any answers here because there aren't any answers. Of course, look at this. Look at how many people have tried to think through this. I was reading about the efforts of some really beautiful collaborations between Palestinians and Israelis who want peace and who are trying to brainstorm solutions for peace. And those organizations have been at work for years and years and year. And so I think remembering that you can draw a boundary around October 7th as a moment when something shifted, it is a moment in a long lineage of moments where something shifted in a really violent and dangerous and generationally significant way.

Sarah [00:04:17] When I think about where I was in my thinking on this on October 7th or November 7th or December 7th and where I am now, what I really started to shift and change for me, I would say over the last year, but particularly since we talked about it in March, when you have Israel blocking all humanitarian aid into Gaza, is that the noise of that complexity filled my head. I would hear the arguments from Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank, the Palestinian diaspora; I would think about the complex history of the founding of Israel in this post-World War II environment. I would about the role of Jewish Americans in our politics, in liberal politics, and democratic party politics. I would have all this swirling sound and noise that would come to play when I would try to think through this conflict and in that moment on October 7th. It was just so loud. And I think what has happened particularly over the last six months to a year, is that I can still see and understand and hold all that complexity. But the actions of the Israeli government have quieted all that noise.

[00:06:15] And I have been forced to just reckon with the actions of a state and to see that state clearly as an actor in this conflict and not let all the noise and complexity crowd out. It's not even that I'd let it. It is that the actions of the Israeli government, in my experience over the last year, have just made that impossible. You can't bring any complexity to it anymore in a way because the actions are so forceful, horrendous that you just have to reckon with that. It's just so big you can't see anything but that, especially with the actions against Hezbollah and the actions against Iran and the military might that they were and have been exhibiting against all these other actors. In conjunction with the action towards the people in the Gaza Strip it felt like the metaphor I keep seeing in my head is like you have this big vision and it just focuses to a pinprick. Like this is what it has felt like has happened. And I think so many of the arguments in my head post October 7th, where I was just desperately trying to hold on to old ideas in particular about Israel and the Israeli government and what that meant and what it stood for, they fell away in the face particularly of this blockade.

Beth [00:08:11] I tried to make an episode of More to Say a couple of months ago about war crimes to give all of us some concrete perspective on what boundaries we do draw around behavior in an armed conflict. And it's all very arbitrary because war itself is a crime against humanity, colloquially speaking. We should not do this to each other. And so what do you do when we are doing it to each other? What do you do especially when one state has acted as aggressor and the other has not? And that's why this conflict is so difficult to talk about because as you said, not everyone thinks of it as beginning on October 7th. When we started talking about this--

Sarah [00:09:00] You also don't have two states. It's not two states, it's one state and like a militia group.

Beth [00:09:07] And a militia group that also is as much of a state as a enormous group of people have. All operating in this very small area of land. So, so many people in such a small region. It's so far away that I think we can sometimes just lose the geography of it, and how significant it is that so much of this is happening in such small region. So when you think about what are the rules in this engagement, it's really tricky. I've been trying to go through this exercise just spiritually for myself over the past couple of years. What does it mean to be against war, but for providing weapons to Ukraine or for providing weapon to Israel? And the first iteration of this for me was thinking, well, I'm very comfortable helping people with their own defense. I am comfortable with us assisting Israel in its defense. I am uncomfortable with us assisting Ukraine in its defense.

[00:10:15] In both of these conflicts though, and in every conflict really, that just doesn't work because the line between defense and offense is ambiguous as well. And depending on your might, vis-a-vis your adversaries, going on offense is sometimes the only strategy. I think what has really shifted for me since October 7th, and really just in the past few months, is looking at the situation and thinking I can no longer reasonably suggest that Israel's goal is primarily defensive. I can't. And so I can longer reconcile my view that there is really no just war. If there is a just war, this isn't it anymore. And that's landed pretty hard for me because of the blockade, because of this idea that if we're not allowing food, medicine, and fuel into a place, that is not about defense anymore.

Sarah [00:11:23] That's a theme I have been touching on over and over again, where I'm just trying to acknowledge where something fundamental has changed. And because of my age, I think particularly politically have lived through the defining moments of my political life. Like when you're coming up in your 20s and you are coming into politics for the first time and you're understanding and figuring out the world, that can be so, so defining, it can lock you into a worldview. And I think that had happened to me around Israel. I think as a lifelong Democrat, and it's not just about politics, about history, when you go back and you look at the allegiances that existed in the progressive movement and the civil rights movement, there's just the ever presence of Jewish Americans, Zionists. There was a lot of crossover of political values and political pursuits that I think locked me into a view of Israel and its leadership and just having to reckon with that's not the Israel that exists anymore. It is a hard right wing government. And I think it's easy to make Benjamin Netanyahu the villain here. And I think he is absolutely a villain here, but I don't think that if he was found guilty in his corruption trial tomorrow Israel would just shake off the bondage that is Netanyahu and move forward into this progressive liberal era.

[00:13:16] I think that there have been real changes and some of those I feel no right to speak to. I don't live there. I don't live under the threat. I don't understand more than I can just intellectually or emotionally, because I love deeply people who are Jewish, this trauma and how it acts on you and how continues to act on you. And so I just have to acknowledge this shift; not from a place of moral judgment, but just from a a place of like the politics of the country have changed. Even because a lot of progressive Israelis have left. That's what I hear from my Jewish friends who are closely connected with this country is that the people who would stand for a two-state solution work towards peace like so many of them have just left. So many of the were murdered on October 7th because they lived in an area of Israel close to the border that was in pursuit of these goals and had a political profile. And so just kind of reckoning with that and thinking like this isn't some sort of temporary situation that if we can exert our influence and get rid of Netanyahu, everything will be different in Israel. I think that was part of this too, just facing like, no, this is where the country's at. And the same way we have to reckon with this in other places in the world where the politics have shifted and they are sovereign nations in pursuit of their own goals and destinies. And however we feel about that, we do have to see it clearly.

Beth [00:15:06] I think you did two really useful things there. One, recognizing that there is a diversity of opinion on both sides of this conflict. So among Israelis, among American Jews, among Jews in the diaspora generally, there's a plurality of opinion. Also on the Palestinian side, I think it can be really tempting for me, my default has been to think of Hamas as an oppressor of the Palestinian people first and foremost. What they did on October 7th was designed to harm Palestinians in this maximalist way and that that is wrong and cruel and a betrayal. But of course there are Palestinians who support Hamas and who at least have some understanding of why it took this action. And so remembering there's a plurality of opinion on both sides. And then you acknowledge here's the profile in my mind that is informing how I view this. So in my own inventory of that over the past couple of months, I have had to really think about the fact that my allegiances and my faith in particular are not tied to anything concrete.

[00:16:21] The place of Jerusalem is important to a lot of American Christians in a religiously significant way. It is not to me. And I know this will hit people wrong. I'm not trying to proselytize anyone, I'm just telling you where my political opinions are formed from. If I find out tomorrow that Jesus never walked the earth, it changes nothing for me. The connection to a place and to a specific factual history of faith is just not part of my worldview. And that limits me from having any reasonable perspective on this territory and what it means to very different groups of people, but with similar levels of intensity. Like that's just a degree of affiliation that I don't feel about anything. And so how can I possibly understand when I looked at that timeline, this really sunk in for me. How can I possibly understand this going on and on and on because I don't feel that depth of connection to something, to somewhere, to some marriage of place and faith. And so when you have that going on, plus culture, ethnicity, language, I'm just trying to raise my family here in this place where we've always lived, I guess it's not surprising that it feels so intractable.

Sarah [00:17:55] And I think the heartbreak for me seeing such depth of suffering in feeling like there is no articulation of what comes next. Well, I say that, but there is an articulation of what come next from the Netanyahu government and the far-right coalition that supports them. Just this week, they have called up 60,000 reservists. They plan to occupy Gaza City. The articulated goal of Ben Gavir and others like him is to extract the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. To make it so painful for them to live there that they leave, which so many have done. Millions are displaced when you have this tiny place. You can walk the Gaza Strip in a day. You can walk across it in about an hour. You can walk up and down in about eight. To drop 100,000 tons of explosives on a place that small is in pursuit of only one goal, which is to empty it of buildings and people. And so if I am both heartbroken by that and heartbroken by what that means about Israel and the goals that it is supposed to be in pursuit of, which is individual human rights as stated in its charter and what it means for the Jewish people, what it means for that the global population of Jews, Jewish Americans; if I have to hold all that and it breaks my heart, not feeling that deep connection, just like you articulated, what could that be like for someone who does?

Beth [00:20:05] That's right.

Sarah [00:20:07] That's why I said it's just a gaping wound this level of suffering. And if you have the slightest interest in history, just a random Tuesday, you got into it on the internet, you understand that World War II changed everything. And it is something we still are grappling with. And so, when you're talking about a place that-- what was that crazy statistic Ezra Klein shared on this latest episode? That more explosives than were dropped on Dresden and Berlin and London combined, then it's going to change everything. And I think whether you feel a close connection, it's just this level of suffering, this level conflict, this level violence, it just affects everything, everyone. There's no country in this world that doesn't have a member of the Palestinian or Jewish diaspora. That doesn't exist. And so it's everywhere. So we wanted to take a minute and work through those layers of what does this mean up next.

[00:21:43] Beth, because the founding of Israel is tied up so much in that World War II moment, including the same year Israel was founded in 1948 is when we had the Geneva Convention, whose purpose is to spare civilians in conflict. There has been, I think, this growing pressure on international law and the International Criminal Court and this shifting globally. You have many nations who this would have seemed out of the realm of possibility just five years ago, 10 years ago that are recognizing Palestine as a state, France, Britain, Australia. And this sort of shifting and recognition, I think, like this changes everything. This is a moment where we have to say we're not just living in the post-World War II reality. We have lived long enough in that reality that it is acting on itself. There are consequences upon consequences now that are shifting indelibly permanently our understanding of that moment.

Beth [00:22:57] I read this article in the Washington Post about protests in Israel and the way that citizens feel about this war and how there's this enormous range of people who are dramatically against what the Israeli government is doing to people who are just tired and don't want to deploy again or don't want to see their loved one deploy again. It's just a big umbrella now of people saying, stop this. And a driver who was trying to get through a sea of protesters was interviewed for this article and the driver said, I get what these people are saying. But it's pretty much us or them at this point. And I thought, I think that that is maybe the only summary that I can conclude from the Israeli government's actions, that that's their mentality. It's us or them. And I think that that has provoked this reaction. I think if Israel had been willing to respond in a more measured way-- I think the world supported a forceful, forceful response to the October 7th attack by Hamas.

[00:24:07] The international community understood that that was an atrocity, that was a war crime, that that was completely unacceptable and required a military response from Israel. But I think that the overplaying by Netanyahu of his political hand merged with this horrific use of military might that you described has made the rest of the world say we don't it's them or us anymore. We are not ever going to endorse one nation deciding that their survival depends on the elimination of another nation even if that nation is not a state. And if the best tool in our arsenal is to say you know what, they are a state to us and we will treat them as such, then that's what we're going to do. I think the body of international law depends on agreement. It's so frustrating. You say it's a war crime. People demand call it a genocide. Okay, what is the next step from there? And the next set from there always depends on agreement. And we don't have agreement here. And so the first real piece of leverage that these other countries have to make a difference is to say, well, Palestine is a state to us now.

[00:25:27] When I look back on this history and the way in which the Netanyahu governs government weaponizes the history, so in one moment they will say Israel is special because of the Holocaust and you should treat us that way and we're different. And then the next minute it's, no, treat us the same as everybody else. You held us to a higher standard. That's not fair. And I think the trap that is for not just the Palestinians, but the Israelis. And the way it trickles out into this sort of weaponization of anti-Semitism you see all the way into the Trump administration. This is a weapon we can use instead of this is a value we protect. I think we've seen the way that we try to have this founding that we're going to protect civilians. The economist talked about this a great deal and I mentioned it previously. I mean, so much of the Geneva Convention was built post World War II on this understanding of a state versus a state, which is not what we're talking about here and makes this structure so much more complicated. And I think you see with the founding of Israel, I mean the Israel government has such a complex relationship with the United Nations because how I would describe it, and I'm sure there are lots of historians who would quibble with my description, is that post-World War II western nations felt both responsible for their turning their backs in so many ways that allowed the Holocaust to take place. And also like responsible enough to not answer for their own hypocrisy and the targeting of civilians and saying, but we won the war, so you really can't get in our face about Jim Crow.

[00:27:47] Whereas, other nations who had been fighting colonialism, particularly post-World War II, felt no responsibility or hypocrisy and just said, we know colonialism when we see it. We know apartheid when we see it. And so they have been harshly critical of Israel from the beginning because of this relationship with the Palestinians. And so it's like everything is informed through that lens. And it's not even through the lens of international law that you can see this tension. There's this fascinating article in the New York Times from Dr. Omar Bartov who's a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, and he talked about the conflict between genocide studies and Holocaust studies. You have most genocide studies experts saying, this is a genocide, and most Holocaust studies saying, how dare you? It's seeing that we set up everything through the lens of this one historical event. And we told ourselves that it was a process applicable. But really, it's all so informed to the point where I think the word genocide only means, and it's why I sort of had that reaction in the beginning, concentration camps. It means the Holocaust. There's no separation. Unless you get to that level, we don't want to call it that. And it's not only impossible to pull yourself out of that framework, it creates a impossible situation for people directly affected by that framework. It presents an impossible situation for the Jewish diaspora, for Israelis. It has created a separate type of moral harm, moral quandary that is so knitted in to every aspect of this conflict.

Beth [00:29:47] And we can never get the legal framework right until we get the moral framework right. It would be nice if those could be distinguished, but with war they cannot be. I'm not for giving up on international law or conventions against torture or anything that tries to protect human dignity. So please don't hear my tentativeness about this as criticism, it's not. But it's just nearly impossible to have a war that doesn't have components of genocide. Like, what are we talking about? The intent of the country that dropped the bomb that they said wasn't targeting civilians, but what if a bunch of civilians did in fact die? I don't know how we're supposed to parse these things, especially because a lot of countries are really committed to these principles until those countries get mad. Until those countries are attacked. It really struck me when you said a moment ago about Israel saying to the United Nations, it's not fair, the standard that you hold us to.

[00:30:48] But there's no fairness period here. There's been no fairness at any moment in history for either the Jewish or the Palestinian people. There hasn't been. Nothing about any of this is fair. And I try to have as much empathy as I can for both sides of this conflict, but recognizing that empathy requires a level of imagination that my life experiences and my personal religious experiences do not inform here. They don't. So there's just this limit. So if I try to just come back to the framework internationally, all I can say is pragmatically right now, who is able to exert power and influence over the Israeli government outside of Israel, I think it's an extremely short list. Whatever the scholars and experts and prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have to say about it, who can actually make a difference? It's not many people.

Sarah [00:31:48] Yeah, when I was reading all these critiques of the Geneva Convention and the international law and the activism of the International Criminal Court, and even the very academic article about genocide from the professor, everybody said basically it's going to be up to the Israeli people. So that's where I get stuck. I'm in a crossroads. And I feel this tension in a lot of conversations I have about this. Do I decide that the Israeli people are just like any other people or like any other nation. They have to decide what they stand for in pursuit of their own security goals and boundaries and borders. Not disconnected from a conversation America is having right now about pursuit of security at our borders. It's on a spectrum. Or out of my own personal experiences and belief system and devotion to the Jewish people and the Jewish faith, do I think that they are different? Do I think that this is different and that Israel is special in the lineup of other nation states? There is space for me to decide how I feel as an American about sending weapons to this nation. There's really no room for me in the conversation about whether I think Israel is different than other nations when it comes to its founding and its people.

[00:33:41] But I think that that conversation, that accountability, that moral reckoning is something I hear cited so many, many, many times among my Jewish friends. I think there is an understanding that that has to take place. And at the same time, I read an article where an activist with standing together was like I don't care why you oppose the war. I do not care. I don't care if you're tired because you don't want your son called up again. I don't care if just want the hostages home. I don't care if you care about the Gazans. If we are standing in the street opposing this, that's all that matters. You're welcome here. And I have mad respect for that. I do think at this level of suffering and conflict, it just has to get down to that level of political on the ground organizations. We know one thing; we want this to stop. And that's what we're going to pursue today. We know one thing; we want Netanyahu out of there. That's what we're going to pursue the next day. Because like you said, I don't see a vision for what comes a month from now or six months from now or six years from now.

Beth [00:35:07] The vision that I've seen articulated is the collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians is from a land for all to two states, one homeland. This vision of a two-state solution, but a confederation that recognizes the practical realities of the geographic area that these are people who must share water. They must share electricity. There are just pragmatic realities to everyone thriving in this area that require cooperation. Now, seeing the path from today to that is really hard. But I felt something shift for me just reading about that idea and thinking, sometimes what seems impossible can materialize on the other side of something that is generational change in a conflict like this. And that is my hope and prayer for the situation. I am narrowing in politically like you are on the question of as an American, what do I support my tax dollars, our tax dollars, funding at this point? And I am more and more persuaded that the most neutral way I can frame it is that Israel has demonstrated a capacity to do more than defend itself. And so our dollars are not needed anymore. And to the extent that Israel has goals beyond defending itself, that is Israel's fight not ours.

Sarah [00:36:52] When you were talking about sharing water, I immediately started thinking about Pakistan and India, two countries that were also forced into a difficult position through the post-World War II environment that involves religious conflict, border skirmishes, sharing of resources. And that situation remain stable because of our active role in it and our ability through weapons and resources and aid to say, we are a player in this and you will do what we want you to do or we will come to the table and make sure everybody gets here and shares what they need. I'm not sitting at those tables. I don't know what has maintained much of the stability between Pakistan and India for decades. But I know it started up again when we left the table recently. And so I'm just trying to think morally I want to say enough. But I don't know if diplomatically and politically, if keeping a seat at the table is more important. That is the one place that I haven't shifted as much because I think it's incredibly difficult and I just don't think I have all the answers or the information.

[00:38:17] I do think that Netanyahu in particular shows an ability to just tell America to go fuck itself, especially democratic presidents that has to be reckoned with. And I think somebody at a certain point, and maybe it will be Donald Trump, has to call his bluff and say, stop treating us like we don't have a say in this because we do, and you know we do. And I would like to see that happen, for sure. And I think I have to reckon with the idea that this is just going to be a permanent pursuit, right? There's never going to be a place we get where we've solved this. With a place as complex as this, it'll always be about momentary stability. Cambodia and Thailand are having borderland skirmishes. When it's a tough border, it's tough border. And I wonder if reducing our expectations and understanding-- because I hate to hear so much reporting that the Israeli people like they don't want to think about it. Like I just don't think about it. And I get that. We didn't talk about it for months because for that exact reason There's nothing to cling to here

Beth [00:39:44] And we aren't traumatized by it. No one came into our community and took our children. So I totally understand the psychological-- I don't totally understand it. I can understand enough to understand the physiological impact.

Sarah [00:39:59] But again because Israel is different and it has this massive Jewish diaspora that for better or for worse are linked. We had a long conversation with a listener about the Jewish Americans and other members of the Jewish diaspora are like both held responsible for Israel, but they don't get to vote. It's not like they don't get a say necessarily. Anybody understands the complex psychology of like you left, you don't a say, or you're not here, you don't a say among a type of family, right? But this growing anti-Semitism, this sense of like if Israel is a villain, all Jews are a villain is very, very real. It's very real. And so how do we grapple with that? And I think that we're all grappling on the other end of how the Palestinian perspective has been so silenced and the way that the Trump administration is pursuing anyone who is critical of Israel under this weaponized anti-Semitism. While also we have to hold the reality that there is an increase in antisemitisms.

[00:41:18] So because this is not just a global hotspot, but because of the way it affects people everywhere including in America. Then you're again in this impossible-- I don't want to use impossible. It cannot be impossible. We cannot look at this and say it's impossible because that does encourage us to turn away. And there is no turning. I do believe that this is a moral harm to every human here on planet earth right now. It affects us all, this level of suffering. The choice to let children starve affects everyone. And so just trying to say, okay, if it's not impossible, but it's so hard we can barely look at it because it is so painful to everyone is something that, in the age of the pursuit of comfort and avoidance seems so difficult. Even though I said, I don't want to call it impossible. I don't want to call it hard. I hate hearing myself saying, it's just complicated. It's hard.

Beth [00:42:37] I try to remember that the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Japan and now we are allies. And so things can shift, things can really shift. And so I hold open that possibility. I want to underline what you said about this administration's approach. I don't know what is in Secretary of State Marco Rubio's heart about any of this, but the actions of our government facilitated through the State Department have linked the United States to Israel as governed by Netanyahu to a degree that I think exceeded the wildest dreams of people who wanted America and Israel to have a special relationship. And to the point where the speech of Palestinians is regarded as a national security threat to America, that's outrageous. That's outrages. And to think of anyone speaking on behalf of the Palestinian people who for decades have been regarded in the Western world as though they are all terrorists and have experienced that prejudice and discrimination, that is a stain on our country. And that is within the scope of what we as Americans need to care about, and I do. I care about growing anti-Semitism, I care growing anti-Palestinian sentiment, I care our government treating Palestinians by their existence as some kind of threat within these borders.

[00:44:20] What you said about our ability to maintain influence, I think is one reason that I have never been comfortable with the BDS movement. The sense that we should pressure American companies, institutions, foundations to pull all economic ties away from Israel has never felt right to me, because then I think you really do lose the opportunity to have influence for peace and to have connections beyond those formed by governments. I've really been rethinking sanctions over the past few years. I am not sure that sanctions, the way that we have used them have made the world safer. I think that there are times when sanctions are a tool that you bring to a situation that can make a difference. But we have so many sanctions on so many people that are in place for years and years and years. And it feels to me like those are situations like I think about Iran specifically where we've just said we've given up on each other.

[00:45:31] If we can't even trade the material goods that people in our nations need to survive and thrive, how can we ever agree about something really complex like a border dispute or like the kinds of weapons you're allowed to have or what your voice means in an international body? How can we do that if we can't even trade? So I have never endorsed that movement in large part because I think that door needs to remain open. And I think you're right. And I don't think there's a situation where the United States could or would or should completely cut Israel off in terms of sharing intelligence, sharing weaponry. We are interlinked. But I think that we could right now through our Congress decide that we will not be supplying any new weapons until Israel allows humanitarian aid to safely and prolifically flow through Gaza and calls off this operation to control and occupy Gaza.

Sarah [00:46:45] I'm thinking about what you said about Japan and the United States because I just finished this fantastic book that was sent to us by a listener called How to Build an Empire. And again talk about something that was informed with both World War II environment. Such a fascinating chapter on Japan and how basically we blame NAFTA for the deindustrialization of America. But the argument of this book is that we built that through this post-World War II environment. Japan was decimated. And so, the guy who started Sony was like a fifth generation Saki manufacturer, but it was gone. The family business was gone. And so you had this enormous American influence with American music and the GIs that were stationed there and American culture and they just had this whiteboard moment where they could build and they did it. The stakes were high, but they were also low and they didn't have a lot to lose. So he talks about that through like the lens of Sony and Toyota and how we built through this economic opportunity post-conflict this partnership between Japan and America. And so I wonder through the lens of the BDS movement, if it's not like you don't have to divest from Israel, but we want you to invest in a Palestinian company as well. It's like something like that.

Beth [00:48:35] Yeah, I like that.

Sarah [00:48:42] Reading that book helped me realize that you cannot fathom the impact of this level of decimation and conflict across the globe. You don't understand how this is going to play. No one does. Even now that we have all this scholarship around post-World War II, no one could have predicted that we would end up here, I think, with Israel and Palestine. Or maybe they could, I don't know. I don't have a good handle on that. I think people could and did predict October 7th to Netanyahu in the face of all the protests around his changes to the judiciary. And he very clearly chose to move forward anyway. And now wants to blame other people for that security weakness. It was fascinating reading the New York Times where one of his aides went and tried to wipe some of the historical archivist records around some of the calls he got on October 7th. So all that to say we're terrible fortune tellers and I think that we get so stuck in a vision of the past that we can't, even if we had all the information because we're such shitty fortune teller, see a vision of the future.

[00:49:59] But this will act out and I think it will act out in terrible ways. I don't think you can downplay the rage in an entire generation of whoever survives, the Palestinians and other people in the Middle East. And this is played out beyond just the Palestinians. There are just fundamental changes because of Israel's military actions in Iran, in Lebanon, in Syria. The whole Every region has been upended and affected by this. It will absolutely manifest in terrible ways, but I don't want to let go that it could manifest in if not positive ways, ways we can't comprehend right now. All we can do is stay committed to talking about it, even when it's hard, even when we don't want to. We look forward to hearing from all of you. We're going to take on a much lighter topic next. Beth, we tried to think of the lightest topic possible, which was summer reading. Just a book by the pool. A book by a pool.

Beth [00:51:18] And that feels heavy for me, even this year, because I just feel like I didn't really do summer reading this year.

Sarah [00:51:22] And that makes me so sad for you.

Beth [00:51:26] Yeah, I just felt like I didn't have a summer. I'm sure we'll talk about that in another Outside of Politics. But summer just was a blink and gone. And so when I was reading by the pool, it was nothing in the category of summer reading. You know what I'm saying?

Sarah [00:51:39] Yeah, that makes me really, really sad. I had a pretty good summer of reading. And now I will say that I did some work on my to-be-read non-fiction pile and particular books that our listeners have recommended or sent. Mad, mad shout out to Natalia Rankin-Galloway. I hope I said your last name because this How to Hide an Empire book is so freaking good. It's been sitting here forever. And it's one of the best non-fiction books I've read in a long time. I read a couple other really good non-fiction books this summer. But you can have a fun summer reading with just nonfiction.

Beth [00:52:13] I do have a nonfiction list. Would you like to hear my list that I'm working through? I'm taking a different approach to my nonfiction. I'm trying to read multiple books at one time. I don't like it, but I'm try to teach myself to see if maybe I could like it if I would give it a little bit longer runway.

Sarah [00:52:28] I like it. They talk to each other. They start to talk to each other.

Beth [00:52:30] They do. And I'm trying to be open to that. And part of the reason I'm so slow is because I take a lot of notes and I have bits and pieces that I think, oh, this could work here, or this could help me with this thing I'm working on. So I read straight through a couple more election retrospectives, and I read through Perversion of Justice about Jeffrey Epstein. That is the book that I literally read by the pool. I don't recommend that. That is not a read by-the-pool book. Although, honestly, if you are going to read it, be somewhere nice, it does help a little bit. But the pile that I'm working my way through very slowly includes What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker. And I feel just really capable now of explaining to anyone what Schrodinger's cat is really about. And I'm proud of that. That feels like an accomplishment. I am reading very slowly Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business by David Portwright.

Sarah [00:53:33] That's in my stack too.

Beth [00:53:35] It's a good one. It's really good. But I do take a lot of notes and it's going really slowly for me because of that. And then I'm reading Super Agency by Greg Beato and Reid Hoffman about AI. And then my fun one, my reward, when I've done like 20 minutes of each of those other ones, is I go and read a little tiny snippet of How to Steal like an Artist from Austin Kleon.

Sarah [00:53:56] I like Austin Kleon a lot.

Beth [00:53:57] Just a delight of a book and really deep in its way, too.

Sarah [00:54:01] You could read How to Hide an Empire by the pool. The author is like legit funny. There are moments of the book that I'm like, this is funny. You're funny.

Beth [00:54:08] I'm for that. I'm for more funny in non-fiction.

Sarah [00:54:10] It's really good. I'm telling y'all it's really, really good. It's so fascinating. But I read a couple other non-fictions I really liked. I read some bad books. I read that new Wally Lamb book. That book is trash. That is a trash book that no one should read.

Beth [00:54:25] Tell me what makes it trash for you.

Sarah [00:54:27] It's just trauma porn. It's like what awful thing could happen to this person, except you don't even care because they're not even a likable character. Who cares if bad things happen to them? I'm not opposed to bad things happening to people. I'm opposed to hard books. I love a hard book. I don't like an easy read. But this book is garbage. It's garbage, don't read it. What's the name of it? Hold on, I blocked it because I hated it so much. The River is Waiting. It's a bad book. Don't read it guys, don't read it. But I read Shark Heart, which was fantastic. I read The God of the Woods. I read a bunch of like the Wedding People. I read some that were getting a lot they're like Reese Witherspoon book club picture. And they were great. Except for James, that was the one that got a lot of picks, including the Pulitzer Prize. And I hated that book. I thought it was bad.

[00:55:13] But I read a lot of fun books for my First Books book club. I read James Patterson. That was not a fun book. That was also a bad book. But the accompanying book we read for the like true crime genre was May the Wolf Die by Elizabeth Heider. And it was great. And guess who her agent is? Didn't even realize it. Didn't realize it when I picked the book. So I got to talk to Elizabeth, which was really fun. You can see that on my Substack By Plane or by Page. Right now I'm reading Hunt for the Red October. That's our next, spy is our next genre for the first books book club. So I'm the Hunt for the Red which everybody loves, but y'all there's so many acronyms. It's too many acronyms.

Beth [00:55:55] I want to know what made you think the James Patterson book was bad.

Sarah [00:56:00] Because it's bad.

Beth [00:56:02] But I'd like to flesh out bad, if you don't mind.

Sarah [00:56:05] Okay, it's a little sloppy. It was just of a time when we were so obsessed with serial killers, why? It was very like, ooh, let's get into the mind of this truly stupidly villainous person that probably wouldn't even exist in real life. We were into that in the 90s. We loved it. It was our favorite pastime. It was sort of more about the killer; whereas, Elizabeth's book is definitely more about the detective like you're like in it with the detective. And the ending, I don't know how much if you've read the book or if you just remember the Ashley Judd Morgan Freeman movie. But the ending is dumb and not realistic. And this would never happen in any court of law. It's so silly. And the killer kind of gets away with it. It's just bad. It's bad, sloppy, but just bad. Although, my First Book clubs members are basically teaching me that I don't like easy reads. Like, it's not bad. It was just not in depth. And I'm like, but that's the same thing. And they're like, no, no, no.

Beth [00:57:18] That's why I'm pressing on this a little bit because I do want to understand, is it just not challenging? Because I like a book that's not challenging if I'm sitting by the pool.

Sarah [00:57:29] That's fine. I read Emily Henry. I read her newest one this summer. Loved it. I'm not opposed to an easy read. They're not my favorite, but I'm opposed to them. Again, it's not even about the crime, like God of the Woods, which is a crime novel so I really liked it. I thought it was great. I liked our first Danielle Steele. And I liked The Hunt for the Red. I don't think it's badly written. I do think it contains too many acronyms. I think it's really that it was just badly written, personally, in my opinion.

Beth [00:58:02] Would you read another, Danielle Steele?

Sarah [00:58:05] I think I maybe would, because this one was so based on her real life and of the moment. I think it might be interesting to read it. And she was getting her groove as Danielle Steele. So I maybe would read like four or five books after this one where she's like really locked in on what a Danielle Steele novel is. I think it would be interesting to read one around there. But did I find like her overall approach like hugely entertaining? I did not.

Beth [00:58:42] I'm interested in the stickiness of authors like her, like what makes somebody keep going back when it's not a series and it's not a continuation.

Sarah [00:58:50] This is my exact pursuit in the First Books book club. Like what is it? What's going on in this genre that makes people come back and forth. It's really been interesting to see how the genre changes. Because we read the first of a very, very, very famous author in the genre. And then we read the first books of a new author in this genre. And so in the romance, Danielle Steele, it's not about the sex or the love story. It's about the heroine. It's the pursuit of herself.

Beth [00:59:18] Her inner life.

Sarah [00:59:19] Her inner life. Whereas, now, in romance novels, the heroine might have some conflict, like the Emily Henry people are usually going through something. But it is a love story. This is about the sex and the love. This is what's happening. And so that was really interesting to see. I thought that Daniels Steele novels would be kind of like a little spicier, but they really weren't. Not anything compared to the new novel we read, which was so dirty. I think it's going to be really interesting with the spy novel because so much of spy novels is about tech. It's hilarious. I was in this part of the hunt for the red October and it was like this new fancy computer on the submarine does 37 million computations a second.

[01:00:00] Do you know how many your iPhone does? Because I looked it up immediately. Six trillion. Six trillion computations a second on your just run off the mill iPhone. So it's like that stuff is funny because it's so tied to impressing you with military technology. So I think that's kind of funny and it'll be interesting to read a newer one. And then our last genre of the year is Westerns and I've really grown to love Westerns so I can't wait to read the Louis Lamour book. But I did read some good ones. I read some good novels this summer. I got into like Southern literature. I finally read The Heart is a Lily Hunter by Carson McCullers. I read The Optimist Daughter by Eudora Welty. I read a bunch of short stories by Flannery O'Connor, which I never read.

Beth [01:00:39] I love Flannery O'Connor.

Sarah [01:00:41] I'm really enjoying it. I highly recommend The Optimist Daughter by Eudora Welty. I bought this little set of American classics. I got like James Aggie, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor. And I'm working through them. It's some good stuff.

Beth [01:00:55] My high school, early college days were hardcore short story times for me.

Sarah [01:00:59] I don't usually love a short story, but I was into these.

Beth [01:01:02] Yeah, I loved Faulkner short stories. I loved Flannery O'Connor. I loved James Thurber. So funny, so good. That was a time. Well, I've decided once I get three of these nonfiction slow reads that I'm into, my reward is going to be fiction fall. Okay. I am going to put the nonfiction down for the season of fall and I'm going to cozy up with fun reads since I did not get a summer of reading.

Sarah [01:01:25] My fall recommendations from my fiction that I read would be The Wedding People. It is fun. There's a reason people talk about it. It's good. It's fun. I liked it a lot. I think the women characters in particular were well written. I did like The God of the Woods. It's darker. People, there's some harm to children. I know people don't like that.

Beth [01:01:44] Okay, I'm not writing that one down, but thank you for the recommendation.

Sarah [01:01:47] Shark Heart you would love. It's very poetic. There's a poetry angle. Do you know the premise of Shark Heart?

Beth [01:01:53] I don't.

Sarah [01:01:54] It is a newlywed couple, and the man learns that he is transfiguring or transforming, I guess, into a great white shark. This is a thing, and it's the reality of this novel. Is that people get this condition and they become an animal. And he's becoming a great, white shark

Beth [01:02:10] Listen, my kids are so into H2O Mermaids. You know that show?

Sarah [01:02:14] No.

Beth [01:02:15] Where these girls transform into mermaids and that's just what happens when they get in water, they become mermaid. So I can handle Shark Heart.

Sarah [01:02:23] It's beautiful. You would really like it because there's a lot of poetic language. I kind of thought about you when I was reading it. So yeah, this will all be in all these breaks. Don't worry guys. We'll be in the show notes. I'm sure you'll take more recs for fiction fall. Absolutely.

Beth [01:02:41] Absolutely. Especially if you have fall oriented storytelling. I'm into that too.

Sarah [01:02:47] Okay, so you want some coziness.

Beth [01:02:50] Yeah, I always want a little coziness, but I'm just saying because I'm going to make it false centric If you have things in that category, I'll take those two.

Sarah [01:02:57] Well, because I wouldn't recommend Emily Henry, but she's best for the summer. All her books everybody's hot, they're sweating, they are at water. Like they're all very, very summery. Now, I do think Elizabeth Strout, anything by her, because a lot of them are set in Maine. They're very cozy. I love her. She's one of my favorite authors. And I finished Tell Me Everything. That was in the spring. I'm going to think about some other coziness for your fiction fall.

Beth [01:03:25] And we do have the next Inspector Gamache book coming out in October, which I'm waiting for with bated breath as well from Louise Pennings.

Sarah [01:03:31] Well, and we're finishing Habits of the Heart soon. We're on our slow read of the Habits of the Heart. Our next one is September 24th. If you want to join us.

Beth [01:03:39] It's been great.

Sarah [01:03:40] It's so good. I can't wait to read the next section. I'm so excited. I love it so much. So join us for that. If you're looking for nonfiction reading, and if you're for fiction, you can join me over on By Plane or by Page and join our First Books book club, which we're having a lot of fun on. So many reading options. I read recently that people's leisure reading is down 40% and that makes me want to weep. Everyone should read more. I feel very strongly about this.

Beth [01:04:07] It's just because people are reading on our phones. We just have to decide I'm not going to read the short phone things. I'm going to read the fun things.

Sarah [01:04:14] You mean just reading generally. Yeah, okay.

Beth [01:04:17] Yeah. You just have to make a decision I'm not going to scroll and read here. I'm going to pick up a book and work through the book. And that's a hard decision. It's not what your brain is conditioned to do. The books are not hooking you the way that the algorithms are.

Sarah [01:04:32] True.

Beth [01:04:33] Us, not you. Us.

Sarah [01:04:35] All right, well, thank you so much for joining us today. Remember, we are running a sale on Substack. So if you've been waiting to join us for the morning News Brief or More to Say or our spicy bonus episode once a week, now is the time. It's 15% off a new annual subscription, but only through the end of the month. So go check that out. We will be back in your ears next week. Until then, keep it nuanced, y'all.