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Brian Lehrer: Today on The Brian Lehrer Show, two things you might prepare to call in with. Later this hour, we'll wrap up our Earth Week Plastics Challenge. Judith Enck, founder of the group, Beyond Plastics, will be on again to hear how it went for you. You still have time to participate in the next half hour or so. Just jot down some single-use plastics you can identify that you've used or seen this week and get ready to call in with what you've seen. At the end of the show, next hour, we will celebrate National Poetry Month with a colon that invites you to recite about 30 seconds of any poem of your choice, any favorite poem. That's coming up next hour, but we start on the news.

We continue on this show to try to talk about and to care about the different suffering parties in the Israel-Palestine conflict and the college campuses situation in this country. For this Passover week and week in which campus protests have been multiplying and expanding, we've been mostly centering some of the really ugly and explicit anti-Semitism that's been getting expressed around some of those, including threatening language or glorifying Hamas attacks that's there. Clear as day to be seen on some of the videos going around, not just by random individuals, but also by organized chanting groups in some cases, sometimes on campus.

To many Jews, it's like nothing that's really happened in the US in this kind of way before. It's a serious eye-opener and source of fear for many Jewish students and faculty and it needs to be called what it is. At the same time, that is not to say that the protests are essentially anti-Semitic as opposed to policy-focused on the war and the occupation. Even the conservative New York Times columnist and Columbia Professor John McWhorter, you know him?

John McWhorter wrote in The Times this week, "I don't think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for the sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war in Gaza. I know some of the protestors, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are anti-Semitic." Though he also writes that, yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses the line into anti-Semitism. He concludes that, "What began as intelligent protest has become in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness a form of abuse," from John McWhorter.

None of this is to say you have to agree with John McCarter, but he's trying to hold some complexity that it's worth considering when so many people have reactions that are Black and white on one side or another. At the same time, calling the police onto campus to arrest and even zip-tie peaceful protestors just to break up their encampments also raises serious questions about college administrators. There's the obvious political grandstanding and pouring fuel on the fire in the name of de-escalation.

Speaker Mike Johnson calling for the National Guard to be brought in when it's not anything approaching a riot, Senator Tom Cotton calling for vigilantism. Did you hear that one? For people to "take matters into their own hands," that's not helping anyone. As I say, we're trying in good faith to listen to and take seriously serious grievances no matter what political camp they come from and try to identify the unserious when they're unserious.

I'm sure we fail in various ways and frequently, as I've said before, but we try with some humility, I hope. That's part of the mission of the show. It's worth saying out loud now and then, I think, in this environment when polarized and aggrieved people are so sensitive than any guest who gets invited, any question that gets asked, any comment that gets made, draws responses from some people that were just out to get their side. Sometimes the same comment or question gets that reaction from people on different sides, just saying.

These dark moments in American politics from whatever side have distracted attention this week from the central concerns for the Israelis and Palestinians themselves. Negotiations remain deadlocked over a truce or ceasefire. Hamas released a video of 24-year-old Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg, seized and injured at the Nova Music Festival on October 7th, a reminder that he's still alive, but also a reminder of the brutality of Hamas' terrorist tactics.

At the same time, the Israeli military campaign continues more out of the press than it's been with the generally accepted death toll in Gaza continuing to rise well past 30,000. The breathtaking and heartbreaking amount of suffering in Gaza remains the biggest thing happening in this period in terms of a human emergency. There's no avoiding that even as other things worthy of coverage and discussion are also happening.

It's all happening in a high-stakes US presidential election year in which President Biden was already facing backlash from multiple sides over his Gaza policy, protests everywhere he goes, and potential non-participation in November over US refusal to place humanitarian conditions on military aid to Israel and, at the same time, Republican claims that he's not standing in enough solidarity with Israel for his repeated criticisms of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the way Netanyahu is conducting the war.

About the campus protests, Biden issued a Passover message on Sunday that said, "There's an alarming surge of anti-Semitism that has absolutely no place on college campuses or anywhere in our country." On Monday, he added an addendum when he said, "I also condemned those who don't understand what's going on with the Palestinians." Some recent writing by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof also reflects the tension around Biden.

Kristof, long a chronicler of human rights globally, has been very critical of Biden's role in supporting the Gaza war effort. His latest column is called What Happened to the Joe Biden I Knew? He also wrote a column last month on lessons from other countries for how Biden can win reelection despite low favorability ratings. Kristof both wants the US to exert more pressure on Israel to spare more Gazan civilians, but also acknowledges that the world is treating Israel with a double standard.

Again, folks, is there room in our hearts and minds to hold both thoughts without getting politically polarized or politically paralyzed? As we try to continue to acknowledge on this show both the complexity and the urgency of the situation, Nick Kristof is our latest guest. He also has a forthcoming book that we'll talk about separately at a later date. It's a memoir called Chasing Hope, but he joins us now on his recent columns. Always good to have you, Nick. Welcome back to WNYC.

Nicholas Kristof: Good to be with you. Thanks for trying to bring a level ahead to this just incredibly difficult and painful issue of Gaza.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for that. To your headline, how is Biden, since October 7th, inconsistent with the Joe Biden you knew?

Nicholas Kristof: Joe Biden, he has always had a real mastery of international affairs from his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and really has first-rate foreign policy aids around him, and yet he's made, I think, a series of miscalculations. He did not expect the war in Gaza to last as long as it did. He thought it'd be over by the end of the year. I don't think he expected that it would be as harsh as it proved to be in terms of leveling entire neighborhoods.

I don't think that he expected Israel to throttle the aid that went into Gaza. To the extent, it did and for risk of a famine to develop. I think that he believed that he could manage Prime Minister Netanyahu when, in fact, it was more the other way around. I think aside from the practical miscalculations, Joe Biden was always a man of enormous empathy. He had a moral vision. In the case of Bosnia, he was outspoken, calling on the White House to do more to protect civilians there during the Darfur genocide.

He was always urging me to write tougher columns demanding that the White House at the time, then George W. Bush, would work more aggressively to protect civilians during that humanitarian crisis. I don't see that same empathy for civilians in Gaza. He is certainly showing a lot of empathy for victims in Israel as is absolutely right, but I see something of an empathy gap. I think that is affecting our policies toward Gaza.

Brian Lehrer: On the empathy gap between Biden's reactions to the victims of October 7th and the victims since, his reaction to the killing of the World Central Kitchen relief workers was an example you gave in your column. Maybe you think that applies to Biden and the campus protests now too. You tell me, but why did you mention World Central Kitchen in particular?

Nicholas Kristof: Well, there had been already, at that point, about 190 aid workers in Gaza who had been killed along with 100 journalists, several hundred health workers. It was the killing of foreign aid workers with World Central Kitchen that really seemed to particularly outrage President Biden and, in fairness, journalists and other people around the world, but that outrage at the killing of those foreign aid workers was certainly appropriate. At the end of the day, it should be also outrageous that Gazan aid workers are being killed quite regularly.

Brian Lehrer: Biden just signed a new military aid package for Israel this week. What would you want Biden to do in that respect?

Nicholas Kristof: The aim is not to cut off aid to Israel. The aim is to use leverage to get Israel to do more to reduce civilian casualties, to do more to let aid into Israel. We have, I think, tremendous leverage in that respect. The Biden administration has been making demands of Prime Minister Netanyahu and of the IDF since almost the beginning. In a couple of cases, they have listened. In general, the fact that we are on the edge of famine in Gaza, I think, underscores that we can use or leverage a little bit more.

Here's just one example. Clearly, the administration has been concerned about Israel not letting enough aid in and about the starvation that is developing. Some kids already starving to death. The administration's response to that has been to have airdrops of food and to arrange a port. Those are fine, but airdrops are not an efficient way to get food in. They have indeed killed some people. The port will present its own security risks.

Meanwhile, in December, the administration used its threat of a veto to kill an effort in the UN Security Council to create an alternative inspection mechanism that would let trucks into Israel carrying food, going through UN inspections rather than inspections by COGAT, the Israeli agency that is doing them now. I think we've missed opportunities to try to reduce the civilian toll and to allow more food into Gaza.

Brian Lehrer: As you say, Biden has tried to influence Netanyahu by persuasion, not by cutting Israel off. It was interesting to me in your column that you see Biden as too confident in his ability to influence through relationships and that that has applied to his relationships with congressional Republicans as well. Can you talk about that for a minute?

Nicholas Kristof: Yes. There's something about politicians that, in general, I think, tends to breed self-confidence. Maybe it's the self-selection process of running for office. I think that Biden has a great deal of confidence in his ability to win people over, to charm them. That's something I like about him, but I don't think it has been as effective as he would've thought in the case of Senate Republicans, for example, or House Republicans. Likewise, I don't think it's been as effective as he had expected in the case of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

I think that was to be expected. Netanyahu's been a thorn in the side of every American administration as long as he's been in public life. The only American official who really figured out how to manage Netanyahu effectively was James Baker when he was Secretary of State. He did that simply by banning then Deputy Foreign Minister Netanyahu from the State Department and marginalizing him so he didn't have to deal with him. I think the idea that he could control Netanyahu and did not need to use leverage was a pretty dubious idea from the start.

Brian Lehrer: Nick Kristof, New York Times columnist, my first guest today for another few minutes. Acknowledging, as I laid out in the intro, that we try to acknowledge complexity, you wrote a whole separate column about double standards as applied to the Israel-Gaza war on either side. You say Gaza is the United States' problem because it's Joe Biden's war and not just Netanyahu's. I think everybody knows that by now. Of course, being anti-Israel policy is not the same as being anti-Jewish, worth repeating.

You also do acknowledge things like that the UN General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions critical of Israel last year and only seven critical of all the other countries in the world combined despite facts you report like the number of children displaced in Sudan by recent fighting is three million more than the whole population of Gaza, and that some of the worst mistreatment of Arabs in recent years is by Arab government's behavior toward their own citizens. You understand why Israelis and many American Jews feel under siege and worry based on history even if they hate Netanyahu and what he's doing in this war, what the anti-Semitism of today might grow into tomorrow, yes?

Nicholas Kristof: Yes, absolutely. If you look at humanitarian crises around the world, then the blunt reality is they tend not to get attention. Yemen, for a long time, was the world's worst humanitarian crisis. I was writing about it. It was just impossible to get people to read about it or care about it. Today, you've got a horrific situation in Myanmar, in Sudan, Ethiopia. The Tigray region is on the edge of famine as well. Well, Haiti as well.

None of those are getting just a tiny fraction of the attention that Gaza is. Is there a double standard in that respect? Yes, absolutely, but I think that there's also then a double standard in people who become defensive about people who point out human rights problems in Israel. We should be tough on human rights violations whether they occur in Ethiopia or in Gaza.

Gaza is particularly complicated because it is our bombs that are being used to drop on civilians. It is our diplomatic protection at the UN that is enabling a starvation to develop right in a region of plenty. There are plenty of double standards all around and I think we need to interrogate them. Look, at the end of the day, Brian, if you care about human rights of Palestinians alone or if you care about human rights of Israelis alone, you don't really care about human rights.

Brian Lehrer: Hear, hear. You wrote in your What Happened to the Joe Biden I Knew? column, which was just before the Columbia encampment started the current wave, that you tell young people on college campuses that shouting is less effective than changing minds. You wrote that you remind college-age voters that Trump would be so much worse for Palestinians. Politico has an article called Biden Camp Not Sweating Political Fallout From Latest Round of Campus Protests.

It says, "Biden condemned the anti-Israel protests embroil in college campuses this week, sparking backlash from younger voters, but those doing the protesting, they believe," the Biden camp believes, "are a subset of a subset of the electorate, one that's drawn disproportionate amount of media coverage compared to its actual political clout." Quoting from Politico, they're reporting on the Biden campaign. Do you have a take?

Nicholas Kristof: People should be suspicious of my political take since my political career lasted about 10 minutes when I ran for governor of Oregon. [chuckles] Be wary of my political views, but I have to say that I do doubt Biden on this. You see public opinion moving very rapidly. A majority of Americans now disapprove of the Israeli actions in Gaza. Just drop like a rock if that will get worse, if there's an invasion of Rafah, or if there is a full-blown famine that develops. Michigan is just a must-win state for Biden. I don't see people in Michigan who would vote for Biden, instead voting for Trump, but I do see some of them just staying home and not canvassing and not supporting Biden. That could cost him that state and the election

Brian Lehrer: Also, it's a question, could there be a lesson from perhaps the last time in US history that saw a college student so angry at a Democratic president? 1968, there was the turmoil at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year. Very famous to people who were alive then or who know that history. The Democrats maybe regretting that they've chosen Chicago again this year with those historical echoes and campus protests peaking right now.

Going into summer, the upshot in '68 was that backlash to the protests, I think it's fair to say, as a matter of history, contributed to the country electing Richard Nixon. Maybe the closest historical analogy we have to Donald Trump. Do you think Biden has to do certain things to avoid history repeating itself in a similar way this summer?

Nicholas Kristof: I do think that Biden should be a little more wary than he is of the risk that these protests will continue indefinitely, and not only complicate his reelection campaign but also complicate the campaigns of Democratic candidates for the Senate and for the House. I spoke to several senators and House members who say that they really can't do public events right now because of the fear of disruptions. I think that it's also, frankly, the protestors who should reflect on this a little bit.

My take is that in 1968, the more radical protesters did indeed help elect Richard Nixon and kept the US involved in Vietnam longer than it otherwise would've been, resulting in more deaths of Vietnamese and Americans alike. I think that while a majority of Americans now say in polls that they disapprove of Israel's war in Gaza that the over-the-top elements, the anti-Semitism that we're seeing in some cases, the violence, the disruptions, I think that antagonizes a lot of people who are on the fence or even who are mildly sympathetic in principle. I think there's plenty for people to reflect on all around.

Brian Lehrer: Last question and I know you got to go and I appreciate you getting up early Oregon time for this. Could it be that among those miscalculating politically are the Columbian and other protestors? Before the encampments, sympathy in this country was trending in the Palestinian's direction. Biden was responding to the protest already happening by increasing his criticism of Netanyahu and starting to take some action like allowing the latest UN ceasefire resolution to pass.

Now, the protestors' decision to occupy and disrupt campuses in the particular ways that they're doing and escalate from demanding a ceasefire to demanding full-scale divestment from Israel or we're never going home. Now, we have Biden denouncing campus anti-Semitism as the core of his remarks this week instead of denouncing Netanyahu. Do you have any political analysis of that?

Nicholas Kristof: Yes, I think that your point is right. It's not clear to me that a lot of the occupation efforts on campuses are doing anything at all for people in Gaza. I think they may be creating a backlash that makes people more opposed to their views rather than more aligned with their views. In the news media, when we cover protests, we tend to go toward the person with the most extreme sign, with the most extreme slogan.

The protests and the occupations have tended to be a moment to showcase anti-Semites, to showcase more violent people. On the police side as well, it cuts both ways. Peaceful protest is great. It's an American tradition. In this case, I wish some of the folks had been raising money for Save the Children in Gaza rather than occupying buildings in ways that may create a backlash that is of no help to Palestinians and Gaza or anywhere else.

Brian Lehrer: New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Nick, we'll speak in a few weeks when your book comes out. Your memoir, Chasing Hope. I'm looking forward to that. Thank you for--

Nicholas Kristof: I look forward to that, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much.

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