Provoking Peace Podcast

Personal Journeys, Political Realities, and Shared Humanity with Peter Beinart & Dr. Dalia Fahmy

• Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom • Episode 6

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In this special keynote presentation from the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom’s annual conference at Rutgers University, co-host Tahija Vikalo sits down with journalist and commentator Peter Beinart and esteemed scholar Dr. Dalia Fahmy for a profound, wide-ranging conversation.

The episode begins with Peter and Dalia opening up about the personal journeys and pivotal life events that shaped their worldviews. Dr. Fahmy emphasizes the critical need for a feminist perspective in political science that accounts for the interpersonal and familial toll of war, while Peter shares his evolution from viewing Israel as an unquestioned safe haven to the destabilizing, yet liberating, experience of seeing the reality of the occupation through Palestinian eyes.

Key Takeaways

  • A feminist perspective on conflict resolution would changes how war atrocities are counted, focusing on the destruction of family units, the lived experience of women, and the interpersonal toll.
  • Unlearning internalized biases is a long but liberating process, requiring us to actively listen to the lived experiences of marginalized groups.
  • The language used around conflict and ceasefires often masks ongoing structural violence; a temporary pause does not equal a long-term peace plan.
  • Data from the Arab Barometer project indicates that prior to October 7th, a vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza (76%) wanted Hamas out of power and desired democratic representation.
  • Meaningful political discourse requires addressing the actions and ideology of Hamas, while also recognizing Israel's historical role in weakening secular, nationalist Palestinian leadership.
  • The struggle against anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Jewish bigotry must be intertwined; both are rooted in a dangerous push for homogeneity, hierarchy, and ethno-nationalism.
  • The Granada Declaration, drafted by 26 scholars, offers a 10-principle framework for combating Antisemitism and Islamophobia together.
  • True interfaith solidarity means showing up for one another to celebrate and exist together, rather than only coming together in the aftermath of violence or massacres.

About the Guests

Peter Beinart 

Peter Beinart is a leading journalist, political commentator, and professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the New Republic, Beinart is known for his thought-provoking analysis on American politics, foreign policy, and the intersection of Jewish identity and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Dr. Dalia Fahmy 

Dr. Dalia Fahmy is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University, where she teaches US foreign policy, international relations, and politics of the Middle East. She is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Policy and has served as a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. Dr. Fahmy is a prominent voice on political Islam and democracy, frequently appearing on major news networks to provide expert analysis on global conflicts.

Notable Quotes

“I never entered the room as the Muslim professor... but what women bring to these spaces and how we study them is that we challenge the data and count differently. We challenge the narrative and look at the interpersonal and take it seriously.” — Dr. Dalia Fahmy

Organizations / Initiatives 

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to Provoking Peace, a podcast by the Sisterhood of Salam Shalom, where we bring Muslim and Jewish women and our allies into conversation to explore what it really takes to build peace in ourselves, our communities, and our world.

SPEAKER_02

We go beyond the headlines to speak with people who are living this work every day. Activists, educators, artists, fake leaders, and more.

SPEAKER_00

We're here to ask bold questions, listen deeply, and invite you to join us in disrupting assumptions and stereotypes. One Muslim and one Jewish woman at a time.

SPEAKER_02

Hi, this is Alison Friedman, co-host of the Provoking Peace Podcast, and I'm really pleased to present to you the first part of a two-part series. It was recorded in November 2025 as the keynote to the Sisterhood of Philometra Alums annual conference at Rutgers University in New Jersey. And even though it was filmed a few months ago, it the content is still highly relevant today. So we're really excited to share that with you so that you can all experience the really fantastic conversation. It's moderated by my co-host, Tahia Vicolo, whom I love dearly, as all of you know. And uh she's the director, the executive director of the Sisterhood of Philemon. And the panelists are Peter Bynard and Dahlia Femi, and uh Tahia will read their biographies um during the recording. So without further ado, here is part one of the uh keynote speech. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_00

So now um we are at our keynote session, and I would like to invite actually let me read the bio first, and then you can you can join us. I am beyond excited at this point to have these two people with us today. It feels like I've been, you know, when you sort of watch movies over and over again, and then you see that star. I've been watching videos of these two people to learn and get inspired and find vocabulary to what I'm trying to say. So having them with us today is just incredible. So we have with us today Peter Beinart. So I'm just gonna read um a quickly bio for both of them. So Peter Beinart, I'm sure you you're familiar, is a journalist, political commentator, and professor who brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to any stage. With a career spanning over two decades, Beinart has become a leading voice on American politics, foreign policy, and international affairs. His thought-provoking analysis and eloquent writing have been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the New Republic. Beinart's expertise is not just limited to print. He is frequent guest on television networks like CNN and MSNBC, where his clear, articular perspectives help audiences navigate, navigate complex political landscapes. Beinart's latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. And I just want to see uh say it is available for purchase. So please, if um there is a uh we have a guest bookseller, so please, please uh look at that and make sure to get one, is a bold and urgent appeal that addresses one of the most significant issues of our time. He challenges the long dominant narrative of persecution and victimhood within Jewish communal life, which he argues has distorted both sacred Jewish tradition and modern history. In the aftermath of Gaza's destruction, he calls for a new narrative that emphasizes equality over supremacy and recognizes that the safety of both Jews and Palestinians are inextricably linked. The child of Jewish immigrants from South Africa, Beinart draws on the global examples of moral reconstruction and offers a vision of a world that recognizes the infinite value of all human life beginning in the Gaza Strip. This provocative and fearless work combines Barnard's personal experience, historical experience, and political and moral insight to expand and inform a critical contemporary conversation. There's much more that I can read, but um I will I will stop here and introduce our other keynote uh speaker, Dr. Dahlia Fahmi. Dr. Dahlia Fahmi is associate professor of political science at Long Island University, where she teaches courses on U.S. foreign policy, world politics, international relations, military and defense policy, causes of war, and politics of the Middle East. All easy subjects. Dr. Fahmi is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy in Washington, D.C., and a visiting scholar at the Center of Study of Genocide and Human Rights and UNESCO Chair at Rutgers University for 2018. Dr. Fahmi's booking books include The Rise and Fall of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Future of Political Islam. That's a forthcoming book, and two co-edited volumes, Liberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy and International Relations in a Changing World. Dr. Fahmi has been present on many news channels ABC, CBC, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, many others. She has presented research in various venues, including Columbia, Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton. And the list goes on. And I would love to invite both of you to come and take a seat on the stage so we can have a conversation. So it's it's wonderful to have you, and I'm I'm honored to be doing this with you. So uh what we kind of agreed is that we would make this a conversation, right? And then um we would ask for questions from the audience. So please use the index cards that are on your tables, we'll collect them and uh ask. Probably we cannot answer all of the questions, but we'll try to answer most of the most of them. So, since the sisterhood is focused on personal narratives as a vehicle and as a tool of sharing our perspectives, sharing our views, making that connection for further learning, right? I um was thinking about starting with something similar with both of you. Both of you have shown great courage in sharing your perspectives, even when they were unpopular or possibly detrimental to your careers. Can we start with both of you sharing your journey and what life events impacted your resolve and brought you to this point?

SPEAKER_03

So, first, it's it's lovely to be here. It's an honor to be here, and let's not kid ourselves, we're here for Peter, not for me. So I'll I'll I'll keep that in mind as I speak. Um it's it's also a homecoming. I got my doctorate from Records, so it's lovely to be here. I think my son graduated from um pre-K in this room, so it's anyhow. So um I was in college, not to date myself, I was uh in college in the early 1990s. And early 1990s, if you remember that time period, this was a moment of great change, right? It was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union, we were talking about the end of communism, um, Tiananmen Square, didn't go so well, but it was this moment where we were obsessed with this thing called democracy. And um, you know, Fukuyama wrote the famous book, The End of History, because not the world, the world was coming to an end, but history as we knew it was coming to an end, the great wars were not going to happen anymore. And it was going to be this moment where international law was going to lead us to the future. We even saw, for example, the Gulf War through a UN mandate. And this is what I wanted to be part of. But in 1993, this article was published in Foreign Affairs magazine. And it was Clash of Civilizations Question Mark. And I watched as it went from Clash of Civilizations question mark to then when it was published in book form, the question mark was removed. And then a year later, when it was in our foreign policy, it almost became exclamation mark. And it was on the premise that Islam had bloody borders. And I remember thinking, what? Like this is so far from the Islam that I know. And so, but the 1990s also showed us in 1994, what happened in Rwanda, a genocide, Somalia, Sbrunica, Kosovo, Bosnia. It became the decade of civil and ethnic violence that happened on our watch. We witnessed it and we stood silent. And so what brought me to this field of studying war, but peace, actually, was this moment where I thought the world was changing. And it was changing for the better for about the span of five minutes, but then very quickly it receded into a different kind of moment. And I remember thinking, you know, there's an American philosopher, John Dewey, who says that democracy is to be renewed every generation. And the midwife of this renewal is the university, it's education. And so, what better place to be part of this renewal of democracy, this vehicle of change, than to enter into the academy? Thank you.

SPEAKER_01

It's really an honor to be here. I guess uh when I think about my journey, at least as it relates to the subject of my recent book, uh, which is uh Palestine and Israel, um, it was a journey in which I grew up thinking about Israel from the perspective of a particular understanding of Jewish history. You know, my grandmother, uh, like many people of her generation, her lives, her life had been very fragile and destabilized by the collapse of various different Jewish communities. And um, and I saw the way that even though she, unlike her brother, never actually moved to Israel, it was the one place that for her seemed uh a constant, a kind of a safe place. I used to visit her in South Africa. She had her family was from the Isle of Rhodes, and then she was born in Egypt, and then lived in the Belgian Congo, and I would always tell her how great America was, and she would always say, Don't get too comfortable there. Uh uh, it's not actually ultimately a place you can count on. And so that resonated very deeply for me, given how important she was. I dedicate the book to her, and also that my grandfather and my father spent a fair amount of time in Israel, and I saw that how happy they were when they were there, and how much of a kind of delight it was for them to be in a kind of Jewish civilization where you saw in the public culture yourself reflected in a way where you don't when you're used to being a very small minority. So for me, that was just taken for granted. Um, it wasn't that I necessarily agreed with everything that Israel did, but the the notion that this place with this particular political system in which Jews were in charge, that that was not something that I questioned. Um and it was really very humbling for me, because I thought I knew quite a bit about Israel, because it had been a subject of my life, you know, since I could remember, it was very humbling and disconcerting for me the first time I spent time with Palestinians in the West Bank, which was really not until my early 30s. And really to be confronted with this realization that a place that I thought I knew well, I really didn't know well at all in terms of what it meant for Palestinians, that I had never really seen Israel through Palestinian eyes. And starting to glimpse Israel through Palestinian eyes was very, very destabilizing and difficult for me. Um, because first of all, the level of brutality that people were describing was way beyond what I had imagined. And and, you know, one can be tempted to dismiss people when they say, you know, well, maybe this one person is just a whatever, has a particularly bad experience. But the more people you talk to, the more you realize actually that you're hearing something that is actually a common experience. I think that I had been raised to understand the fear of Jews and the fear of Israeli Jews, but I had never really myself had any experience of what it was like to live under the control of a state that has life and death power over to you, but it's completely unaccountable to you. Because if you're not a citizen, you can't become a citizen, you can't vote. Life is a daily terrifying experience because the state can really take whatever it wants from you, and there's really no recourse that you have. And I think the most difficult thing for me to, the and the most perhaps the most important part of the journey for me that began on that day but took a long, long, long time to kind of, and it's still a work in progress, was realizing that as I confronted Palestinians as fully human beings, that I was surprised that when I when the Palestinians I met didn't seem to have any particular interest in harming Jews or even hating Jews, um, and that seemed to be reflecting all the same kind of human qualities that I was used to in the life that I had led with Jews, I'm ashamed to say that that was surprising to me, you know, um, and it only then really hit me that because I had grown up always hearing about Palestinians, but not listening to Palestinians, and thinking of Palestinians as a kind of a mass of vaguely dangerous people, that I had carried a lot of dehumanization around inside of me. Um and that that challenge the struggle against that dehumanization, against that racism didn't happen in one day. It's been a long, long process. But it's been a process that for me has been actually quite liberating in a way, um uh to feel um and and that uh I see that liberation, particularly with younger uh American Jews, the sense of kind of being liberated from that sense of fear. Uh it doesn't mean that there aren't things to be afraid of, but it's a re it's it's it's a recognition that actually the thing to be afraid of is a system of violent oppression, which makes people uh which makes people unsafe. Um I'll stop that. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you both. Um I just want to kind of go back. Uh and and Dalia and I had a very quick exchange in the room in the back, where um I told her that we would ask her something more kind of about her. And um not not anything, but just the importance of telling our story who we are. And Peter, you shared a lot of that. I and I just I I promised Dali I'll push her a little bit. So I just wanted to sort of you are dealing with topics that are lofty topics for for people to take on, and you are wearing your identity on your sleeve. You're a Muslim and woman. And can you just speak a little bit about that sort of journey of being that and doing this work? I understand democracy is your sort of uh focus, but if you can just say a little bit what you as a woman in this space have experienced.

SPEAKER_03

It's interesting because we're we're conditioned as professional women to separate ourselves from what we do, right? It's it's to be, we don't talk about being mothers, we don't talk about you know being women. You enter into the room as a man, and that's how you behave, and that's how you can become accepted, right? So, you know, our generation was raised a little differently than the current generation. So I never entered a room as the Muslim professor, right? I'm an expert in my field, period. I never entered the room as the voice of women. I can't speak on behalf of all women. But what I think we need to understand, especially in the way we look at conflict, the because of the absence of women, let's start with that first, we have a very different understanding of the conduct of war, violence, and atrocities. So when we when we look at how, for example, in in we count the effects of war. I'm sorry, let me just be a peer professor for a second. Historically in the United States, it's been body counts, kill ratios, and the cost of armament, right? What we don't count is the effect on the family, right? What does it have to mean to have a militarized society? What does that do to the family, right? For example, in Rwanda, what does it mean that rape became a weapon of war? Can these women mother, right? We don't talk about this in the conduct of warfare. And so a feminist perspective and how we look at the conduct of warfare and how we count war atrocities, it takes into account the interpersonal, right? It takes into serious account what does it mean to be able to live as a community, to live as a society, to exist as a family unit, right? So when we take this to the current context of what's happening in Reza, you know, we we talk about counting war, right? 36 hospitals are eradicated, the the um scholastici, that there is no education system, 30 or students not going to school. We don't talk about what does it mean to be a woman who menstruates in war, right? We don't talk about what does it mean to be a girl at this time, right? What does it mean to be valued as an individual? And so what women bring to these spaces and how we study them is that we challenge the data and count it differently. We challenge the narrative and look at the interpersonal and take it seriously. When we study conflict resolution, for example, and the conflict resolution narratives, it takes the measurement of violence very differently. So we know, for example, we count direct violence. What is direct violence about killing children? Okay, what is indirect violence? The systems that allow, for example, hunger to perpetuate, which leads to the killing of children. But I want to talk about the culture of violence. And the culture of violence is what causes us to be unable to see the violence and the narratives we use to justify violence. And when we think about what we're doing here, right, it's moving beyond the first level of direct violence. We think combating structural injustice is how we get to justice. No, it's actually about combating the cultures of violence. And this is where the importance of our presence becomes a hurt. Where I need to enter into this space, yes, as a woman of faith, yes, as a woman, yes, as a mother, yes, as someone who believes in the integrity of the family unit, and one who's compelled, because I believe it's my obligation on this earth, as commanded by God, to uphold justice with a capital J. And so when we think about what we do as when we enter these spaces, as an academic, yes, I teach the theories, I teach the literature, but as a woman, as an individual, as a feminist, it's about understanding that we need to wrap our heads around the culture of violence that allows us to either not see what is happening or the narratives that allow us to justify what is happening. And so I didn't tell a story, but that's what I believe my purpose is in this space.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you so much. Um so this sort of brings me to the second point or second question. And I just want to sort of address it immediately because we're in it. And that is the ceasefire deal that was um now it's it's been a week, right? That that um was established, or I don't even know. So so I wanted both of you to address this moment. I know we're hearing news this morning that there's no such thing as ceasefire at the moment, but I just wanted you from your own sort of where you at to talk about this very moment that we are at. And I just wanted to, and I'll talk about the language, use of language later, but what I every time when I hear uh ceasefire deal, my stomach sort of churns because it Feels like it's negotiating over people's lives, like it's a deal or no deal type of thing. And it really, even use of that language is hard to absorb. But um, so we can talk about that. But if you could just address how you how are you feeling, how are you thinking in this moment after what happened over the past seven, eight days? Peter, do you do you want to start?

SPEAKER_01

Um it's been very difficult. Um, I felt in some ways similarly to how I felt on October 7th in the immediate aftermath, which is profoundly, profoundly conflicted. Because I do believe that there is an obligation to a form of Jewish solidarity. Um, you know, we say all Jews are responsible for one another. So when Jews, when the Jewish people are suffering, or when the Jewish people are celebrating, as with the return of the hostages, I feel a very strong obligation to be part of that experience, to be part of that suffering and to be part of that uh celebration and and to and and and uh not to be apart from from my people and my community from which I draw everything, you know, but so frequently in the way these things are constructed in the in Jewish spaces, including the ones in which I live, that the price of participating in that solidarity is erasing Palestinians and dehumanizing Palestinians. And so I feel very, very caught. So the the release of the hostages was an incredibly emotional and important experience. You know, we had had them on the names of the hostages on the my refrigerator door. We prayed for them every single week, um, and they were a constant, they were a constant presence. And I was really in awe of the people I knew who who day after day after day were doing tangible things to keep their memories alive. It's a very say, you know, it says in the Tama that you can sell the beams of a synagogue to pay for the redemption of a captive. It's very, very central in Jewish tradition. But when people were saying, why aren't the pro-Palestinian activists celebrating? I thought, I was thinking, well, are you looking at what the terms of this ceasefire actually are? Because yes, Palestinians can celebrate the fact that Palestinian uh captives are returning, many of whom were taken without any due process, many of whom, like the hostages, have been suffering various forms of torture. But the larger structure, if you look at the plan, um, besides the fact, besides that, yes, maybe there will be more food in, maybe, um, and and and maybe the bombs will stop, or at least the number of bombs, the the scale of them will stop, but it's an absolute nightmare. It's an absolute nightmare. I mean, I just think it's important thinking about it in terms of land. Gaza is less than 2% of the land between the river and the sea. It contains 30% of the Palestinian population between the river and the sea, which is largely because most of the people who live in Gaza are the descendants of people who were fled there when they were expelled in 1948. So it's already one of the most overcrowded areas, right? It was already condeemed an open-air prison by Human Rights Watch and unlivable by the United Nations before October 7th, right? Before October 7th. Now it's been reduced to rubble. Nine out of 10 homes destroyed, 80% of the acres of farmland destroyed. And what does the Trump plan actually look like? Israel is now in control of 53% of Gaza. And even if they get to the second phase, which is very much a question, it will, Israel will still be in control of 40% of Gaza. And it's actually the percent, the half of Gaza that Israel is in control is the more is the more fertile part where you can actually grow things, right? And Israel has controls all access in and out. So you're taking this population and you're now basically asking them to live on half of that territory, right? With no genuine chance, I think, for reconstruction, um, because I think the blockade will be harsher than it was before October 7th. So people are supposed to celebrate this? I mean, even if you believe that the genocide is ending, which I think is very much a question, it may just be a genocide by other means, you're supposed to celebrate because you're going from genocide back to apartheid, back to blockade. How are people gonna live there over the long term, right? And I believe that the Israeli goal historically, which has been as much land as possible with as few Palestinians on it as possible, is the outcome that we're seeing here. And I think that it the the long-term pressure on power, the message to Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, but also not just in Gaza, is there is no future for you here. You would be better off somewhere else. And I can't celebrate that.

SPEAKER_03

So last week on on Monday, so Friday was the signatures, and I think we need to just remind ourselves that this was not a peace plan, right? This was not a ceasefire deal. This was a paragraph that is a commitment to cooperation that was signed by four Arab leaders and not the Prime Minister of Israel. So it it this there's a ceasefire agreement, but there isn't a peace plan, right? There's there's no Camp David Accord, right? So so this is not, we're using similar language, but it's it's very much not that. Even the 20-point peace plan is not signed on to, and it's not a peace plan, and it's not uh detailed. So uh when the agreement happened on Friday, and then we uh um listened to the speeches and knew that there was hostages going to be released, and you saw the anticipation of families that uh folks are coming home, um, of course these are moving images, they should have never been held for this long. And we also saw images of Palestinian children coming to the streets wondering where the drones are. The sky is peaceful for the first time in two and a half years. And there's no self-service in most of Gaza, so when the the ceasefire was announced, people were knocking on each other's doors saying the bombing is stopping. And that we don't talk about, right? We talk about the release of Palestinian captives, those are Palestinian hostages. We don't use those words, we erase them of their humanity. We saw an autistic child return to his family and we talk about him as a prisoner. That was a that was a child, autistic child who was released, not understanding where the world he's in. And so when we talk about the interpersonal, it's to make sure that we are really understanding the realm and the power of the vernacular, and that when we talk about the lived experience, that the lived experience, the witness of the experience matters a whole lot. We are witnesses to this. And so I I guess I'm a pessimist by nature because I know what's coming around the corner. I was hopeful because you saw these glimpses of happiness in the lives and the faces of these families. But then we saw the video images of Palestinian mothers having to watch body upon body to try to identify their own relatives' mutilated bodies. And we have to ask ourselves, what are we doing? Like what is really happening here, right? We have to have this confrontation, right? We can go through the data and statistics and the measurements of territory, but we actually have to confront ourselves with this, the ugliness of what's happening, right? And what is, you know, we we actually have data, like so Haretz published a poll, and this is to me one of the most troubling things because I've been saying for a while it's Israel's right of right-wing government, right? But Haretz in in May published a poll, and 84% of Israelis uh want uh the complete removal of Palestinians from Gaza, and 50% of Israelis don't want within Israel non-Jewish non-Jewish Israelis, so that means Christian and Muslim uh Israelis should leave. To me, that was the troubling part is that within our communities, leave politics aside. The narratives of othering are so deep that these data points exist and we can ignore them, right? This is where this is where our role becomes really important, right? Leave politicians aside for a second. We need to start having these conversations, right? I know Professor Aftab and I, she she can, she will attest to this, that I don't allow folks in around me to say, look what the Jews are doing. Within our own communities, we have to be very careful about the power of language, right? Because this is how we create the othering. And this data needs to be understood and studied. You know, the Arab Barometer Project, which is one of the most um, you know, there's an Afro-barometer, Eurobarometer, this is really renowned data that we have. We have data from October 6th, folks. We have data from October 6th about what Palestinians and Gaza want. And the data tells us on October 6th, so October 6th, the UN released a report that 2025 was one of the most violent years for Palestinians and Gaza. October 6th, the poll was concluded, and what did they find? They found that 76% of the inhabitants of Ghazza want Hamas out. 76%. And if there was an election held that that that day, that both Hamas and Fathanna PLO, none of them would be voted in. And so it to me it always begs the question, right? Had a democratic election been held that day on October 7th, rather than an act of terror, perhaps that's how you would have gotten rid of Hamas through the Palestinian people. The poll was conducted again this year and last year, and still 65% of Palestinians and Gaza do not want Hamas in power, even with what's happening. And so we still have to ask ourselves, in these most dark of moments, what is it about the human condition that wants to be seen, wants to be heard, wants to be understood, wants to matter, wants democracy, wants good governance, wants corruption out of politics, and wants representation, and sees that all of that is not existing for them, both internally and externally. And so we sitting here in our comfortable privileged positions can help in the external sense. Because to a certain extent, we've been met internally from folks that are asking for representation, good governance, accountability, but also to be seen and heard as equal members of humanity. And if we really believe in the UN Declaration on Human Rights, it becomes incumbent upon us to actually articulate this in how we talk about what's happening today, and to be very careful that the erasure of the lived experience of the average Palestinian that continues today is part of the problem. The conflict is protracted when you don't acknowledge the humanity of others, right? It becomes about the moment and not about the 200-year present. In conflict resolution theory, we are consistently working on a 200-year present. If we want to get rid of war and violence, we need to account for our behavior for the next 200 years.

SPEAKER_01

Can I um I wanted to just add something because I think it's really important. I think sometimes I notice that the pro-Israel discourse is constantly, constantly discussing Hamas. And I find in pro-Palestinian discourse often there's very little discussion of Hamas. And I think that actually it's really, really important to actually discuss Hamas in exactly the way you're talking about, right? Which is to say, it's important for me to say that I think Hamas committed war crimes on October 7th. I don't, you have the right to resist if you are if you are under oppression, if you're occupied, but you don't have the right to target civilians. And that Hamas committed war crimes before that, when in you know suicide bombings during this the Second Intifada in the 1990s. But it um uh and it's Hamas has an Islamist ideology, which I oppose. I don't believe in the idea of Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic states, right? But it's also just when you say that this was just a war against Hamas or that the problem is Hamas, it's it misses so much, right? It's it's ahistorical in the sense that, I mean, the reason that Israel actually was quite sympathetic to Hamas when Hamas was emerging from the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s was that Israel actually couldn't imagine any group more threatening than Fatah, right? The nationalist Palestinians and leftist groups like the PFLP. They thought the Islamists were the moderates, right? So uh if if the if the if Israel's problem is just the Islam ideology of Hamas, then it really doesn't explain what kind of problems Israel faced before Hamas was created in 1987. But it's also the case that if Israel actually had a policy of wanting to weaken Hamas, right, and support the emergence of other Palestinian politics, it would do completely different things than the th than what it is actually done. In the West Bank for two decades now, you've had a political leadership which is not led by Hamas and has actually collaborated with Israel in kind of shocking ways, actually, by basically trying to make sure there is no armed resistance, right? Uh and yet, and Israel has has weakened that leadership again and again and again by promoting settlement growth and making those Palestinian leaders look like fools, really, for basically for abandoning armed resistance and for recognizing Israel. And even now, when Hamas, according to the reports, asks for the release of Marwan Barguti, right, who is the most popular Palestinian leader, who's not an Islamist, who's not in Hamas, who would might win the election that you're talking about, and provide potentially a newly unified Palestinian leadership that could bring together different factions that wasn't led by the people who led October 7th. A man who's been whose release has even been called for by some from the Israeli security establishment. Israel immediately rejected that, right? I mean, Israel was willing to let out people from jail who Israel claims have been involved in the killing of Israeli civilians. So that wasn't the reason they didn't let Bargti out. The reason they didn't let Bargudi out is he's too popular, right? And because he could potentially unify Palestinians around a legitimate political process, right? And so I think this is really why it's so important to kind of recognize that so much of the vernacular you're talking about is is misleading in the way we think about what's going on.

SPEAKER_00

Well, thank you. Thank you for that. I there are many questions I would like to ask and follow up on this particular topic, but um I I also want to go into a few other areas that are important to sisterhood work. I I cannot not say this. I actually met with uh some members of the Bhagudi family. You reminded me uh one time in the West Bank, and um and what he said, you know, Tahia, they're Jews, they're Christians, they're Muslims, and they're Burgudis. I don't know if you, but it really is a family that kind of has philosophy and work and stamina and and all that on their own. Just had to share that it came to my mind. Um, so um in 2022, the sisterhood board approved uh the use of anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim bigotry language as opposed to Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. And we have been sort of sticking to that terminology for a number of reasons that are pretty evident with everything that is going on and what we are witnessing. So um can you tell us about your own? So I'm basically what I'm trying to say is we're talking about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, but we really try to use the terminology that is more human-focused. Can you tell us about your own work and perspectives on these forms of hate and how they have evolved over time in global context in your own work? And what role does policy, foreign, and domestic playing fueling or mitigating anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim bias?

SPEAKER_01

Sure. I mean, I I first of all I appreciate that language. Anti-Semitism is a is a is a very poor word. It comes out of 19th century German race science that saw Jews as a Semitic race. Um, it's kind of unfortunate that it's the word that is just in common currency. I think um that fundamentally the the struggle against bigotry, the struggle against anti-Muslim bigotry and the struggle against anti-Jewish bigotry have to be seen as one and the same. Because I think that um the, you know, one of the kind of macro, the macro struggle we're seeing all around the world is a struggle between the idea of equality under the law, that people should be treated equally under the law in the countries in which they live, irrespective of their religion, their ethnicity, their race, and the idea that states should be run by one dominant tribe, and then everybody else are kind of guests who, if they can stay, they have to, they have to be on their best behavior, right? And in and that idea is is rising in Europe, it's rising in the United States, it's rising in India, it's rising in many places. And it's extremely dangerous for both um Muslims and Jews. And you often find that that the people that you find in polling, people who have the most anti-Muslim attitudes also have anti-Jewish attitudes, and vice versa, because they're basically have a view of society which is based on homogeneity and hierarchy. The problem is that oftentimes it's difficult to focus the struggle against anti-Jewish bigotry in that way, because the institutions that supposedly lead the struggle against anti-Jewish bigotry are themselves involved in defending a system of Jewish supremacy. Their focus is primarily on protecting Israel from a critique of its political system, right? And so they're kind of caught in this contradictory position, right? Because if you want to def if you want to delegitimize and discredit and slander and even criminalize people who question Israel's political system, you almost inevitably have to make common cause with anti-Muslim bigots, because anti-Muslim bigots are often the most, are some of the most reliable defenders of the state of Israel, right? The irony is that those, those, many of those, those anti-Muslim bigots who like the State of Israel are not reliable friends of Jews in the United States, beginning because they're ethno-nationalists. They like it when Jews are in Israel, their country, and they don't mind if Jews have supremacy there. But the flip side of that is they want then Jews to recognize that this is a white Christian country in which Jews need to recognize their subordinate place, right? And so, in this way, the centrality of the defense of Israel in the fight against anti-Semitism has, I think, been really, really corrupting of uh of the struggle for an ability of people to kind of lock arms across different backgrounds and different faiths and struggle for the principle of equality under the law. And so I really think that if we are going to if we're if we're going to fight against these forces that menace both Muslims and Jews in the United States and beyond, we can the Jewish institutions can't coherently do that. They can't effectively do that if they're trying to simultaneously argue for the principle of equality in the United States but supremacy in Israel. You either basically believe in the principle of equality under the law everywhere, or you don't really believe in it. And we see as a result of that, actually, that many of these Jewish institutions are have become kind of de facto allies of the Trump administration, right? Because their primary goal is to try to prevent this rising tide of pro-Palestinian sentiment from translating into public policy. And they're willing to support Trump's authoritarian agenda because it will criminalize a lot of that pro-Palestinian protest. And so they're actually empowering a group of kind of white Christian nationalists who don't ultimately don't believe in a vision of the United States in which Jews will be fully equal citizens. And it is truly, and I'll stop, it's truly horrifying to me given how much Jews have benefited from America's move towards the principle of equality under the law. And have we benefited from things like independent universities that can be centers of dissent against against political power, to see Jewish institutions basically undermining the independence of those universities and threatening the principles of liberal democracy in order to try to protect the state of Israel.

SPEAKER_03

Total agreement. And when we think about, again, we'll we'll use the wrong terms anti Semitism and Islamophobia as if it's a phobia that can be treated with Islamophobian Tylenol, right? When we think about them as Racialized forms in the racialized forms, in the in the secular form, in how they are weaponized categories. One of the biggest dangers that we find ourselves in today is that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are weaponized against one another. Not that we're combating racism like we used to, you know, maybe four years ago. That when they are weaponized against one another, for example, in certain parts of Europe, to prove that you are an anti-anti-Semite, you must make some pretty Islamophobic claims. And so for the past three years, um, 13 Islamophobia scholars and 13 anti-Semitism scholars have been coming together every year to chart a path forward. And so this past June, we came up with the Granada Declaration on Combating Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. It'll go live next month, but it was soft-launched at the United Nations Day to Combat Hate this past June. And what we've come up with is a clear, 10-principled understanding that we, in the racialized forms, we can't eradicate one without the other. Just like we can't eradicate anti-black racism and xenophobia, an understanding that these are all built upon one another. That to combat Islamophobia, I must be combating anti-Semitism, combating anti-immigrant sentiment, xenophobia, racism. And to combat anti-Semitism is to also combat Islamophobia, because in their racialized forms, they are their objective is the dehumanization of these two populations. And if you reject one, by extension, you reject others just as you reject all of them. And so this becomes the kind of test for us, for this community, right? If you remember after in the olden days, 2016, um, we saw this enormous coming together, for example, for the against the Muslim ban, right? People flooding to JFK Airport to celebrate Muslims arriving. Like I recognize how bizarre that sounds coming from me, right? But when the second Muslim ban happened and protests were not authorized in New York City, the first 20 people arrested combating Muslim ban 2.0 were 20 rabbis who said, we know where this stuff leads. I want you to ask ourselves, I want us to reflect with ourselves what has happened. Because today we're not showing up for one another. You folks are, but in the majority, we're not showing up for one another. We're not showing up for one another. We've actually allowed the mantra of the combating, the kind of pitting against one another to enter into our public vernacular to now where we don't we don't we don't show up for one another. When the Tree of Life massacre happened, very close to when the Christchurch massacre happened in New Zealand. And of course, the first thing I do is I call my local rabbi and friend. Come stand with us. Christchurch, same thing. He says, Can I come? I said, Yes, come stand with us. I remember in the mosque after the Christchurch massacre, he looks at me and he says, I can't wait until we're not showing up for each other because there's been a massacre. When are we going to actually move the way our faiths tell us to move in this world? Because our faiths are based on ethical principles of building, protecting, moving towards justice in this world so we can attain it someplace else. And he looks at me and he says, When are we going to stop meeting when there's been a massacre? When are we going to meet to celebrate? When are we going to meet to simply break bread? When are we going to meet to exist? And so it begs these deeper questions of how has it become that even in the secular racialized forms, there's a resistance today to combat them together? And I know this is a different community, a different subsect of our of our civil society, but to me, one of the most pressing things is that we as a in America are no longer showing up en masse for one another. And that's when the weaponization of identity politics has really permeated our communities. And it begs the question of what is it going to take to move beyond that? And that's when groups like this become extremely important.

SPEAKER_01

If I could just add, I entirely agree with that, but I do think there's one actually one example of showing up for one another, and which is really remarkable, which is taking place right now, which is the relationship between Zoran Mamdani and Brad Lander. I mean, you know, um Zoran Mamdani is being exposed to um just an avalanche of just like the most crude anti-Muslim bigotry from Republicans, but also from some uh so-called Jewish Jewish leaders. Um and yet I think uh uh I think Brad Lander, who was beaten by Zoran Mamdani, which is never the easiest thing, Zoran Mamdani is a much younger man with as not as long a political record, and they don't agree actually on everything when it comes to Israel and Palestine. But Lander still made the decision to basically be an ally to Mamdani and support him and help to defend him against some of these attacks, which I think has actually been very politically useful for them. And I think offers the possibility of uh, I mean, to me, is a kind of model of the politics that we might be able to see nationally.

SPEAKER_02

Hi, thank you so much for listening or watching the first part of the recording of our annual conference from November 2025. So we're really excited for you to next be able to see part two. So stay tuned. Are there any questions you've always wanted to ask a Jew or a Muslim but didn't know how or where to go? Ask us at podcast at slsspeace.org. We don't speak for everyone in our communities, but we're happy to give you answers from our own perspectives. And to learn more about the sisterhood, subscribe to the newsletter on our website, SOSSPeace.org.

SPEAKER_00

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