What if Americans saw Palestinian and Jewish Israeli lives as equal?

JVL Introduction

In this podcast Peter Beinart reflects on the conversation Mehdi Hasan had with Congressman Dean Phillips from Minnesota the previous week.

It offers, says Beinart, “a glimpse of what American public and media discourse about this war, and about Israel and Palestine more generally, might be like if Palestinian lives were considered equal to Israeli lives.”

You’re prepared to sacrifice more than 200 Palestinian lives to rescue four hostages, asks Hassan, despite recognising the appalling cost?

Does it work the other way around? How many Israelis, persists Hassan, can Palestinians kill to free Palestinian detainees who are currently being tortured in Israeli captivity?

Phillips can’t answer the question and Beinart explores why. In the end it boils down to taken-for-granted assumptions: “there is a natural kind of tendency to think that Israel’s Jews are fully human, and therefore like us”.

It doesn’t even occur to interviewers in the States to ask “people to imagine how Americans would react were we in the situation the Palestinians are in”.

Mehdi Hassan does and presses the point home.

And Peter Beinart insists on the importance of this lesson.

RK

This article was originally published by the Beinart Notebook on Mon 24 Jun 2024. Read the original here.