It's the Brian Lerishow on W. Edm I. C. Good morning, everyone. We're awaiting remarks by

President Biden in Israel when he speaks. We will take those remarks. One thing about

the war and the crisis in the Middle East is that almost nobody can see how it ends.

Each side insists on its right, in fact, its obligation to violently defend itself when it's violently attacked.

Each side has suffered massive numbers of casualties. Each side cites history, not just current events, to justify its actions.

Each side often says there are not two legitimate sides at all to the basic questions in the region. Is there any way out?

Journalist and commentator, Peter Bynott, Peter Bynott, hope so. He has a New York Times essay called There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation.

It must survive. Peter Bynott, for those who don't know his work, has long written about U.S. foreign policy and about Israel.

He is an editor at large for Jewish Currents magazine, has previously been editor in chief of the New Republic, teaches national reporting and opinion writing at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.

He is author of books, including The Icarus Syndrome from 2010, about the U.S. overreaching in foreign policy, especially in its recent wars, and his 2012 book, The Crisis of Zionism.

Again, his New York Times essay, published on Saturday, is called There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It must survive.

Peter always goes to have you on the show, how horrible that it's under all these circumstances, but welcome back to WNYC.

Thank you.

Your article, I want to tell our listeners, fundamentally addresses something that came up on the show from a caller this week, with a Palestinian scholar guest at the time.

The caller asked, wouldn't the Palestinians be more successful in their fight for self-determination if they were strictly nonviolent and look like the moral superiors, like Nelson Mandela and the ANC in Africa and the anti-apartite struggle,

or Gandhi's movement in India or Martin Luther King's here.

And your article opens with exactly that analogy. I hadn't read it before we had that call.

So would you start where your article starts in South Africa in 1988, and tell the story of how you think it and the world response to it compares to the Palestinian experience?

Sure. So in 1988, there was a series of bombings in civilian areas, in white civilian areas in South Africa.

And the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela's organization, which was waging a struggle to overthrow the apartheid system, did something pretty remarkable.

It basically said, our fighters did this, and it was wrong, and we're going to try to make sure it never happens again.

Now, the ANC was not a nonviolent organization. Since 1961, the ANC had been agreed to the wage arm struggle, but it wanted to make sure it wasn't doing so against civilian targets.

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