The Beinart Notebook

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. In the shadow of the war with Iran, Israel is doing terrible things in Lebanon: demolishing homes, killing more than one thousand people, displacing close to a million from their homes and perhaps pushing the country toward civil war. To discuss all this, our guest will be Rami Khouri, a deeply knowledgeable commentator on Lebanese and international politics. He is Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, Director of the Anthony Shadid Archives Research Project, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington and author of the Rami G. Khouri Substack. Please join us.Cited in Today’s VideoI’m grateful to Dr. Dror Bondi, Corcoran Visiting Chair in Christian-Jewish Relations at Boston College, who brought the Heschel quote about Abravanel to my attention. He cites it in this lecture.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with。)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen details the way Israel is using the current war to seize more Palestinian land in the West Bank.On the It Could Happen Here podcast, Dana El Kurd explores intra-Palestinian debates about armed resistance.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked with Sari Bashi, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, about the dismissal of charges against five Israeli soldiers who were filmed violently abusing a Palestinian detainee in the Sde Teiman detention facility.AppearancesOn March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.PartnershipStarting today, all paid subscribers of The Beinart Notebook get a 50 percent discount on a one-year paid subscription to Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter. I’ve known and respected Bob for decades — my earliest appearance on his show will turn 20 this year, and the latest happened earlier this month. He’s a rare voice of reason on questions ranging from foreign policy to psychology of tribalism to AI, and I think you’ll find a lot of value in his writing. The NonZero Newsletter is part of a broader effort Bob has been building called the NonZero Network — a group of independent Substack voices, including mine, as well as Glenn Loury, Kaiser Kuo, and others with whom I may not always agree on substance, but who share a commitment to intellectual honesty and reasoned analysis.Reader CommentA listener (who asked that their name be withheld) commented on last week’s video, in which I argued that synagogues should remove the “We Stand with Israel” signs that dot their lawns.They write:“I think you mischaracterize attacks on Zionist institutions. I have seen these attacks’ defenders on social media, and their line is not support for attacks of synagogues as such. It is, rather, support (or at least apologia) for attacking institutions that align themselves with the Israeli state. I saw some people claiming that Temple Israel [in Michigan] was sending money to the IDF. That sounds dubious—I’m not intimately familiar with the Israeli military’s funding strategies, but it seems unlikely that American congregations play a major role—but it is certainly true that many Jewish American institutions’ support for Israel goes beyond the purely notional. To say, then, that one should not attack Americans who ‘share a religion, an ethnic, national ancestry, a race,’ with some disfavored foreign country—in this case, Jews and Israel—is to box with a strawman. To the attack’s supporters, it’s not about Jewishness as such, under whichever of the four rubrics you name one wishes to conceive of it; it’s about Zionism, and it’s about Israel.”See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:I recently came across a quote that just kind of stopped me, like, dead in my tracks, kind of almost dumbfounded, because it reflected a view of how Jews should live and think, which is so radically in contrast to the views propounded by the leadership of the organized American Jewish community today.The quote is from a biography that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote of a remarkable Portuguese 15th century figure named Isaac Abravanel. Now, Abravanel was an advisor to the Portuguese king, as well as being a very distinguished commentator on the Bible and philosopher of Jewish thought—really a remarkable synthesis of the kind that you were able to have on the Iberian Peninsula for a period of time.And then in some ways reflects the kind of possibilities that might be imaginable in the United States today, in which Jews have the freedom to both wield political power and also study Torah in a serious way. And this is what Heschel writes about Abravanel and the Jews of his period in the Iberian Peninsula.Heschel writes, ‘the Jews, who had held imposing positions in the state, left their Spanish homeland. Had they remained on the Iberian Peninsula, they most probably would have taken part in the enterprises of the conquistadors.’ And then he says, this is the most astonishing line, then Heschel says, ‘the desperate Jews of 1492 could not know that a favor had been done them. That a favor had been done them.’What Heschel is saying is that the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula were lucky to have been expelled because it meant that people like Abravanel, who had these positions of great power, that they then did not become morally complicit in the terrible crimes that the Spanish and the Portuguese were to commit as conquistadors in the New World.Now, one can very legitimately argue with Heschel’s perspective, I mean, it is quite radical, and I’m not sure even I would necessarily endorse his view that one should say thank you for having been expelled from one’s home because it means that then one is not morally complicit in the terrible crimes that the kind of empire in which you played a prominent role has committed. It’s a very, very audacious thing to say. I don’t think I would go as far as what Heschel is saying.But it is just an astonishing, astonishing contrast to contrast that moral perspective that Heschel is offering to the dominant attitude in the organized American Jewish community today. And if you look at the leaders of America’s most influential Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, but also the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, others, they’ve all been, in recent months, basically saying the same thing.Which is that American Jews, because we’re in an era of rising antisemitism—which is true—that Jews have a responsibility only to themselves. Jonathan Greenblatt, in particular, has this new slogan, which he likes to repeat, which is, put your own mask on first. That basically, because we are in a precarious moment for Jews, and because, allegedly, other groups have abandoned Jews, you know, American Jews, in our hour of need, by which people like Greenblatt mean they didn’t wholeheartedly support the destruction and genocide in Gaza, therefore, Jews are relieved of their moral responsibilities to fight for other people in the United States, no matter what they’re going through.Now, this is a radical contrast to the perspective that Heschel is offering in his biography of Abravanel. And one might be tempted to say, well, you know, I mean, this is a completely otherworldly, profoundly naive perspective. How could someone, make this argument, you know? But Heschel wrote his biography of Abravanel in Berlin in 1937 under the rule of the Nazis. In 1937, Heschel wrote those words, right?And so, you just think a man who could write those words about Jewish moral responsibility, about the necessity that Jews not participate in the brutalization and of oppression of others, what right on earth do we have to tell Heschel that he’s naive for writing that? Because we’re worried about antisemitism in the United States in 2026. He’s writing in Berlin in 1937, and yet he still was not saying, let’s put on our own mask first, right? He was actually saying something radically the opposite.Again, not to say that Heschel wasn’t concerned about the preservation of Jewish life. He himself escaped from Nazi Germany. Of course, he was profoundly concerned about that, but not at the expense of the notion that Jews had a responsibility to care about others. And I think what he’s saying by writing about Abravanel, and focusing on a Portuguese Jew who is, for a period of time at least, has great influence in the kingdom in which he lives is to suggest that when you have greater power, you have an even greater moral obligation to try to oppose the crimes that are being committed, to not be complicit, right?I mean, I don’t think Heschel could have imagined a figure like Stephen Miller. I think he would have literally… it would have shaken him to the core to imagine America producing a Jew like Stephen Miller, with his power doing what he’s doing today. But in writing about Abravanel, he was in some ways warning about that possibility and making a kind of remarkable, even extreme statements about the importance of Jews never allowing ourselves to create figures like we, in the American Jewish community, have now created in Stephen Miller.I can’t imagine, I can’t imagine what Abraham Joshua Heschel would say were he alive today about the people who claim to speak for the organized American Jewish community, people who have so radically repudiated his moral fervor in his belief that Jews have a profound, fervent responsibility to take moral responsibility for all of the people in the societies in which they live. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and political analyst based in Israel. Since this war began, I’ve struggled to understand why most Israeli Jews support it. I discussed this last week with the Iranian, Jewish, and Israeli writer and translator Orly Noy. But sometimes, the people who best understand a society are those who live within it as outsiders. It’s that experience of marginality, of seeing things from below, that often animates the insights of Black writers in the US and long animated the insights of Jewish writers in Europe. That’s why I’m turning to Diana, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, to help understand Jewish Israeli society in this awful moment. She’s someone I’ve been learning from for a long time. And I’m grateful to have the chance to do so again this Friday. Please join us.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane explains AIPAC’s attack on liberal Zionist politicians.Greg Sargent on how the Iran War is hastening the end of the Trump coalition.An insightful discussion with Esfandyar Batmanghelidj on the American Prestige podcast about how this war might change the long term trajectory of the Gulf countries.Last week I spoke to Bob Wright (whose newsletter I strongly recommend) about Israel, antisemitism and this war.On March 26, Jason Stanley will speak with Nikole Hannah-Jones in Brooklyn about his book, Erasing History.AppearancesOn March 17, I’ll be speaking at George Washington University.On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:I want to say two things about this terrible attack on a synagogue in Michigan. The first is that no matter what Israel does, no matter how immoral or brutal or horrifying, it doesn’t justify attacking a synagogue or justifying attacking American Jews in any way. There’s a basic principle here. The principle is that Americans are not responsible for the actions of foreign governments or foreign organizations just because they share a religion, an ethnic, national ancestry, a race, with that state or foreign organization.So, by that principle, it is just as wrong to target a synagogue because you’re upset at what Israel did, as it was when people attacked Chinese Americans because they were angry at the Chinese government during COVID, or when people attack Muslim Americans because they’re angry at Al-Qaeda, or ISIS, or Hamas, or Iran, or as when the United States government itself held Japanese Americans responsible and put them in internment camps because of what the Empire of Japan had done in Pearl Harbor. These things are all fundamentally wrong.And—not but, but and—Synagogues in the United States should take down the signs that many have on their lawn that say, ‘We stand with Israel.’ They should take them down, because those signs make the congregants less safe, and because they are immoral. Because they create a climate of… they make the Congress less safe, because they encourage exactly the same conflation between Israel and American Jews that we must resist, and because in this moment, doing so is immoral.Now, if it were morally correct for our synagogues to say in this moment, ‘We stand with Israel,’ then I think you could make an argument that even though those signs may make the congregants less safe, that it would be legitimate to do so. You could say that it’s even courageous for Jews in a synagogue to come together and say: we’re going to take a moral action that’s going to create some risk to our safety because it’s the right thing to do.But how could one possibly argue that this is the right thing to do in this moment? That it is morally right to put yourself at risk by conflating yourself with the Israeli government when the Israeli government is doing the things that it is doing now.Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that the Russian Orthodox churches in the United States, that they had signs saying ‘We stand with Russia.’ By putting those signs out there, they would be putting, to some degree, the people inside those churches at risk, because there would be people who were furious about what Russia had done in Ukraine, that might take out their anger against people in those churches. But beyond that, it would be immoral to say, given what Russia has done in Ukraine, for a church to say, ‘We stand with Russia.’And what Israel has done over the past few years, to Palestinians, and now, also, in Lebanon and Iran, is worse than what Russia has done in Ukraine. It’s worse. Let’s just look, for starters, at the numbers. The best numbers we have suggest that since the war that began in 2022 with Russia’s invasion—expanded invasion, because they first invaded in 2014—that perhaps 100,000-150,000 Ukrainians have been killed, which is horrifying.In Gaza, the best numbers we have is that perhaps 100,000 have been killed by Israel, directly and indirectly. So, that’s a slightly smaller number. But remember, Ukraine has 40 million people. There are only about 2.2 million people in Gaza. It’s a much, much smaller area, and yet almost as many people have been killed. The percentage of people in Gaza who have been killed is 4-5% of the population. In Ukraine, it’s perhaps a quarter of a percent.The oppression and the violence that Israel has committed against the people in Gaza also is much older, long predates what Russia has done in Ukraine under Vladimir Putin. The people in Gaza are there because their families were expelled from what’s now Israel in 1948. Gaza has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, and that occupation never ended, contrary to what you often hear in American Jewish spaces. Because even when Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers in 2005, it maintained virtually all control over people and goods coming in and out of Gaza by air, land, and sea. Yes, with some assistance at the Rafah crossing with Egypt, but even there, Israel had a lot of control of what goes in and out.So, Israel has killed many, many more people in Gaza than Russia has done in Ukraine. And the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and beyond long predates Russia’s invasion in 2014, and then expanded invasion in 2022. And that doesn’t even include now what Israel has been doing over the last couple of weeks. Estimates suggest that Israel has killed 850 people in Lebanon, including perhaps 100 children. The U.S. and Israel have killed, estimates are, about 1,300 civilians in Iran. These attacks on the oil facilities have created this toxic black rain that will have health and environmental consequences for years, maybe even decades.Now, I am very, very familiar that the Israeli government and its supporters have all kinds of justifications for all of these actions. And frankly, Vladimir Putin has his own justifications, and I think they’re all fundamentally wrong. They’re all fundamentally wrong. Because no justification, nothing justifies the targeting of, the mass killing of civilians, especially when you are targeting them, as Israel has targeted them in Gaza, for instance, when it shut off food, fuel, and water at various intervals after October 7th, or when you attacked oil refineries that you know are going to have these toxic environmental effects.So, if it’s wrong to put out a sign, for a church to put out a sign that says ‘We stand with Russia,’ surely it’s also wrong. For a synagogue to say in this moment, ‘We stand with Israel.’ And it’s surely wrong to put yourself, your congregants, at risk for something that is also immoral. So, what could the synagogues say on these signs, on their lawns instead? They could say, ‘We stand with Israelis and Palestinians.’Or they could do something more radical than that. They could say: ‘This is a house of Torah.’ This is a house of Torah. The reason I say this would be a more radical act is it would be a response, it would be a re-centering of Torah in American Judaism. What has happened in so many of the synagogues, as exemplified by the ‘We Stand with Israel’ side outside, is that Israel has eclipsed Torah as the object of veneration, the object of worship inside these religious holy spaces.I say worship and veneration because when the synagogues put the sign out that says, ‘We stand with Israel,’ it’s not like they then reconsider that sign every year or a couple years based on what Israel’s doing. Oh, we stand with Israel, we don’t stand with Israel because we think Israel is acting in some moral or immoral way. You know, Israel’s human rights organizations have now just said that it’s committing apartheid and genocide. Maybe we should reconsider that sign. No, that’s not the way this operates. Because it’s not actually a statement of political support. It’s more like a statement of worship, that fundamental to our Judaism is our belief in this state, no matter what the state does. That’s what I mean by worship rather than mere support.And replacing that with a sign that says ‘This is a home for Torah’ would be a moving away from this idolatrous centering of the state as an object of unconditional good, right? Unconditional value, irrespective of how it treats the people inside of that state, and a reassertion that what is at the center of this synagogue, what’s at the center of Judaism is Torah, is our religious texts that are far, far older and deeper than the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. And what this synagogue stands for is the study of those texts as a way to try to understand how we as individuals and how the Jewish people should live, right? And that would be a radical act in this moment because, in so many American Jewish spaces, Torah has been eclipsed by the idolatry of the worship of the state.And now, now we see not only that that form of idolatry is making American Jews less safe, but it’s sapping the fundamental, moral core of what these synagogues are supposed to be about. Torah speaks in many, many voices. I don’t want to sanitize it. I don’t want to suggest that there are not horrifying things in Jewish religious tradition. But the best of our religious tradition suggests that by studying these texts, we can become more sensitive to the value of all human life, that we can become more ethically refined, and we can have a deeper understanding of the preciousness of the people with whom we share the world.When you put out a sign that says, and keep it there, ‘We stand with Israel,’ even after something that has been called a genocide by Israel’s own leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, it seems to me you are contributing to a diminution, a denigration of our moral, ethical refinement.If a synagogue wants to have a conversation about whether it’s moral to have this sign, ‘We stand with Israel,’ on its lawn right now, I would suggest do so after you have invited someone from Gaza to speak to you. Do so after you’ve invited someone whose family is now in Lebanon or in Iran under these bombs falling on them. Listen to what they’ve gone through, and then ask yourself, is this the best message that we can advertise to the world? ‘We stand with Israel’ in this moment? Or might a statement like ‘This is a home for Torah’ be a better way of understanding what it means to be a Jew in this moment. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comI taped a conversation with Orly Noy, an Israeli writer born in Iran who translates Farsi literature into Hebrew. We talked about the excruciating experience of watching her adopted country attack the other nation that she considers home.

Our guest is Aslı Ü. Bâli, the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale. Given the magnitude of what the US, with Israel, has now done, I wanted to talk about more than just Iran, about the kind of global power the United States has become, and what it means, not just for the safety of people in the Middle East, but for people across the world. Aslı is the most brilliant thinker I know about international law, American foreign policy, and the Middle East. I’m grateful she made time for this conversation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Negar Mortazavi, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and host of the excellent Iran Podcast. We’ll talk about the potential for another US and Israeli attack on Iran, how Iranian dissidents view such a move, the role of the Iranian diaspora, and America and Israel’s efforts to boost Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah.Ask Me AnythingOur next Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY, will be this Tuesday, February 24, from 11-12 AM Eastern time.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Josh Nathan-Kazis writes about the Jewish community’s reckoning over Les Wexner, patron of Jeffrey Epstein.Muhammad Shehada on how Europe might develop an alternative vision to Trump’s plans for Gaza.My friend, the Swedish writer Goran Rosenberg, has published a beautiful memoir, Israel: A Personal History.Give a Purim gift to Israelis who resist the draft.AppearancesI talked about white Christian nationalism on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNOW.On February 24, I’ll be speaking via Zoom to the Britain Palestine Project.On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, Donald Trump has moved this massive military arsenal to near Iran, and there’s a lot of reports that any day now, the U.S. could launch a military assault on Iran. And when I watch the debate about this kind of thing in the United States, I find it very frustrating, because I find that even people who are against Donald Trump attacking Iran, it seems to me, don’t necessarily raise the most fundamental questions. They say, well, how do we know this would work in overthrowing the regime, or how do we know it would work in eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, or, you know, why hasn’t Congress had a vote on this, or why hasn’t Donald Trump explained it to the American people, or why isn’t he focusing on domestic issues?I mean, all of these are legitimate points to make, but it seems to me, they miss a far more fundamental point, which is: by what right does the United States have to attack a country that clearly poses no threat to the United States, and that the American exceptionalism is so deep in mainstream American political culture that almost never are Americans asked to flip things, and imagine the idea of Iran or China, for that matter, attacking the United States, right? To reverse the lens, the notion that the United States somehow has the right to do things to other countries that we would never, in a million years think it was okay to do to us is just so baked into American conversation. But I think it’s just worth doing the thought experiment, right?Think about the justifications for America’s attack on Iran, right? And think about how they could be applied if a foreign country wanted to attack the United States. So, one is that Iran has this nuclear program, right? Doesn’t have nuclear weapons, but it supposedly has some kind of nuclear program that could be used to make nuclear weapons one day, right? But Iran has done a much better job of complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty than the United States does. Iran actually signed the Obama nuclear deal, which actually went beyond the obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, right?The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty basically says that countries that don’t have nuclear weapons cannot get them, but crucially, it also says that nuclear-armed countries need to move in the direction of disarmament, right? Donald Trump has moved exactly in the opposite direction, right, basically scrapping the remaining nuclear arms control treaties that exist, moving to modernize and build more and more nuclear weapons, right? So, if the claim is that you have the right to attack countries, because they’re not meeting their obligations on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, I think that would be a better justification for attacking the United States than for the United States attacking Iran.The second claim is that Iran represents a threat to its neighbors. Now, it’s true Iran has supported groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah and groups in Iraq that have taken violent actions against Israel or against American troops. But the level of aggression that Iran has been involved in vis-a-vis its neighbors absolutely pales to the degree of aggression that the United States has been involved in vis-a-vis its neighbors, right? The United States literally just sent the U.S. military in to kidnap, to abduct a foreign leader in Venezuela. The U.S. is basically, as Donald Trump has threatened to use military force to take over Greenland. He’s threatened to use, kind of, economic coercion to take over Canada, right?Israel’s also used much more aggression in terms of just the number of bombs that they’ve been dropping, the number of troops they’ve deployed outside of their borders, but if the claim is that you have the right to attack Iran because it represents a threat to its neighbors. Well, ask the people in Venezuela, or Colombia, or Mexico, or even Canada how much of a threat the United States represents to its neighbors; a far greater threat than Iran does.And the third argument that, you know, for the U.S. use of military force against Iran is that Iran is oppressing its own people. Now, again, I mean, if you think that Donald Trump is actually, genuinely concerned about the Iranian people, you just have to have been sleeping under a rock for the last 10 years. I mean, the idea is so absurd, right? We even see in Venezuela that Donald Trump shows no interest in actually trying to support actual democracy in Venezuela. He basically just wants, you know, autocrats who will basically allow him and his cronies to take more oil. So, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that the U.S.’s goal in Iran would actually be to produce a more decent government that treats Iran’s people better, right?But again, if the argument is that you have the right to take military action against Iran, a country that does not, clearly does not threaten the United States, and because it’s doing terrible things to its people, well, the United States under Donald Trump is not as repressive as Iran, you know, towards its… domestically. It’s very repressive. It’s not as repressive as Iran, but if we’re looking at the human rights violations that the United States has committed around the world, right, with eliminating the USAID, which is going to lead to the death of millions and millions of people, right? Or America’s contributions to climate change, which are also going to lead to the deaths of huge numbers of people, as the United States is the largest emitter and basically has refused any efforts to curtail its emissions, right?Again, if the claim is that you have the right to attack countries because they’re committing grave human rights violations, well, again, by that logic as well, people might say that countries have the right to attack the United States. Of course, they don’t have the right to attack the United States, and even raising the conversation in America would make people think that this was an absurd idea. But it is American exceptionalism that prevents us from recognizing that it is just as morally absurd for the United States to bomb Iran as it would be for another country to bomb the United States.We still have so much work to do in the United States in overcoming this legacy of the idea that the United States is somehow on some different kind of moral or legal plane from other countries. If that was ever the case, it sure as heck is not now, right? Nobody—virtually nobody— around the world sees the United States that way, and the Americans have to… we have to stop seeing America that way. Only when we do that, I think, will we be able to address the fundamental problem with this new kind of imperialism that Donald Trump is practicing, which is based on the idea that the United States somehow can hold itself above the laws and moral norms that bind other countries. The United States has no right to do that. And that, it seems to me, is what’s at the most fundamentally wrong with this horrifying impending attack on Iran. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe