Essay and book review by Abba Solomon, here in The Multiplural World, Feb 3, 2025 (with related readings and interview further below)
(This essay and book review was originally published by Z Network on Jan 28, 2025)
The dominant self-conception of the Jewish story is innocence, repeated persecutions, and then redemption by creation of the Jewish nationalist State of Israel. This narrative is critically examined in Peter Beinart’s new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.
Beinart’s book says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel’s agency in creating the resistance it faces: “We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims.”
Beinart is a former editor of The New Republic and is today an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and a New York Times contributor. He has been in a 20-year progression of seeing, more and more sharply, the “Jewish and democratic” state of Israel as anti-democratic and incompatible with Jewish tradition.
He writes that support for a Jewish state has become “idolatry,” permitting endless killing, torture and oppression of Palestinians: “There is no limit. No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite.”
Contemporary Jewish life is filled with that idolatry, he observes. “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”
The book attributes the horrors imposed on two million human beings in Gaza not only to Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but to Jews: “Worshipping a country that elevates Jews over Palestinians replaces Judaism’s universal God – who makes special demands on Jews but cherishes all people – with a tribal deity that considers Jewish life precious and Palestinian life cheap.”
Beinart is not playing the peekaboo game of saying for half the time that Jews are not responsible for Israel while in the other half of time saying that Israel is the Jewish State. He’s not speaking of “all Jews”, but fairly saying that “representative” and “mainstream” Jewish organizations world-wide are now universally Zionist. Anti-Zionist organizations are dissident.
He observes that many synagogues have an Israeli flag on the bima (platform where the Torah is read) “and issue a prayer for Israel in the liturgy”.
It was predicted and warned about, as the Zionist movement grew, that the effect of creating a Jewish nation-state would be Jews being seen in the light of that state’s actions. The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in the diaspora is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel’s actions, on campuses and in the streets world-wide.
Beinart places the Hamas violence of October 7, 2023 in context, writing it is consistent with the history and actions of suppressed peoples who are without peaceful means to contest their status, as was seen in past slave revolts and anti-colonial guerilla wars.
I note that Beinart’s thoughts are resonant with what, almost 100 years ago, historian and then-Zionist Hans Kohn, wrote of 1929 anti-Jewish riots after 12 years of Zionist colonization in Palestine under British authority: “We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course, the Arabs attacked us in August. …They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt. …We have been in Palestine for 12 years [since the Balfour declaration of 1917]) without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people.”
Israeli retribution since October 7, 2023 against the two-million-plus population of Gaza and their means of life sustenance – homes, utilities, schools, universities, hospitals – has officially resulted in over 46,000 deaths and innumerable injuries directly from IDF attacks. The medical journal Lancet estimates deaths as likely much higher, counting “deaths from starvation, disease or cold.” Most of the population of Gaza was made homeless, huddled in improvised shelters, pushed by IDF warnings from one “safe zone” to another, often then bombed.
Beinart’s book is an analysis of Zionist apologetics that are necessary to both regard oneself as moral and defend what Israel has done, from the 1947-49 Nakba – terroristic expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their communities within present-day Israel – to Gaza in 2025. He denounces dehumanizing, demonizing, Zionist lies about Palestinian resistance: “These claims don’t withstand even modest scrutiny. They’re less arguments than talismans. They ward off dangerous emotions like grief and shame.”
Using the model of the dismantling of apartheid South Africa, he tries to envision what principles could heal Palestine: “The details matter, but they matter less than the underlying principles. Wherever they live together, Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law. And they should work to repair the injustices of the past. The Israelis who were made refugees on October 7 should be allowed to go home. And the Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home. Historical wrongs can never be fully undone. But the more sincere the effort, the greater the reconciliation that ensues.”
This would be a radical re-conception of Jewish life in Palestine, that Jews may live as Jewish Palestinians by abandoning the role of conquerors. He makes the point that whites relinquishing apartheid was a more peaceful process for South Africa than having it overthrown.
In the summary chapter of the book, Beinart says Israel’s conduct stems from a heretical Jewish tendency believing Jewish people are sacred as opposed to being people with extra obligations. “So what if a few dreamers in Moorish Spain or the Silesian shtetl [Eastern European Jewish village] consoled themselves with the idea that deep within us lies a special spark of the divine? They didn’t have the power to do anything about it.”
This self-deification, first proposed by an Israelite named Korach who challenged Moses’ leadership, hadn’t mattered as much until the creation of “Jewish” national power. “All that changed with the creation of Israel. Only once Jews control a state with life-and-death power over millions of non-Jews does Korach’s claim of intrinsic Jewish sanctity become truly dangerous.”
Beinart calls for liberation for Jews from the Zionist doctrine that Jews are only victims, never victimizers: “We can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world. …We can lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world.”
More than level of observance or denomination, the question of Zionism is going to be a fault line in Jewish fellowship, Beinart believes. “Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it’s not clear what is left. But the benefit of recognizing that Jews are not fundamentally different from other people is that it allows us to learn from others’ experiences. Jewish exceptionalism is less exceptional than we think. We are not the only people to use a story of victimhood to justify supremacy.”
Israel’s perpetual peril is the Arab populations it has displaced but not exterminated. They are determined to redeem their birthright to live as freely in Palestine as Jews do.
Instead of conquest, Beinart proposes a model of restraint, cooperation, and respect – along a line of Jewish thinkers from Ahad Ha’am to Judah Magnes to Albert Einstein. Many of the visions for Jewish settlement in Palestine were universalist and pacific. In 1927, Zionist writer (and Chaim Weizmann protege) Maurice Samuel mused in his book, I, The Jew, that Jewish civilization “for sixty generations” demonstrated “that neither conquest nor oppression was necessary to its survival. …a group can survive without mass murder.”
Whether trauma or hubris allows Zionists in Israel and elsewhere to trust that model — finding the image of God even in their “enemies” — is the question.
Related:
* Peter Beinart discusses his new book, ‘Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza’, six-minute broadcast on ‘Morning Edition’ (NPR), Jan 29, 2025
* A ‘new story’ for Jews and Palestinians: Author Peter Beinart discusses his newly published book ‘Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza’, interview published in Columbia Journalism Review, Jan 29, 2025 Reviewing: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, A Reckoning, by Peter Beinart, published by Penguin Random House, January 2025
Here is the brief introduction to the CJR interview:
Earlier this month, Jacob L. Nelson wrote in a piece for CJR about how the American Jewish press has interpreted changes within the community precipitated by Hamas attacking Israel on October 7, 2023 and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that followed. He described a period of fragmentation, with American Jews critical of Israel moving decisively away from a mainstream establishment that no longer felt like their political home. Meanwhile, some Jewish groups previously aligned with progressive coalitions have found themselves feeling betrayed by former allies who refused to denounce the deaths of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. The war in Gaza, Nelson wrote, “did not create a rift so much as intensify an existing one.”
Over the past fifteen months, Peter Beinart has found himself struggling to bridge this very divide. Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic who has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, and Israel’s Haaretz (among many other publications), currently teaches journalism and political science at the City University of New York and serves as editor at large for Jewish Currents, which describes itself as “a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left”. After undergoing a political transformation of his own, Beinart has become known in recent years for his critique of Israel’s ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and of the politics of Jewish supremacy. My introduction to his work was a 2021 article in Jewish Currents in which he argued against de jure Jewish statehood and in favor of a binational, one-state solution in Palestine and Israel.
Beinart is also a strictly observant Jew. As the war in Gaza unfolded, he told me “It was surreal to feel just horrified day after day by what I was seeing and then to see the organized Jewish community reacting with support.” Beinart saw something deeply wrong with the emphasis on Jewish victimhood and with the idea that the incursion into Gaza was an act of Jewish self-defense: “It struck me as having the effect of giving people a set of rhetorical strategies to allow them not to feel, and to allow them not to see,” he said. And so he wrote a book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, which came out yesterday. In it, he argues that Jewish safety should not—indeed, cannot—come at the expense of Palestinian dignity. “We must now tell a new story,” he writes in the book’s prologue. “Its central element should be this: We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims.” Beinart and I spoke in advance of the release of the book about the politics of word choice, writing for a skeptical audience, and the Palestinian texts that have shaped his thinking. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
