(RNS) — Journalist Peter Beinart is one of the American Jewish community’s foremost critics of Israel, admired and followed by many on the Jewish left and reviled by those on the right.
In his latest book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” he appeals to fellow American Jews not to look away from Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza — a horror, he argues, that Jews have a moral obligation to confront.
Beinart does not minimize the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. But in Israel’s retaliatory response in Gaza, he argues, Israel — and its American Jewish enablers — have forfeited the right to use the virtuous victim trope.
“By seeing a Jewish state as forever abused, never the abuser, we deny its capacity for evil,” he writes.
That evil has been ongoing as Israel has denied legal equality to most of the country’s Palestinian residents, he argues. It wields life-or-death power over millions of subjugated people and most recently, has utterly destroyed Gaza.
Drawing on lessons from South Africa, where his parents were born, and from Jewish tradition and history — he worships in a Modern Orthodox synagogue — Beinart offers a trenchant critique of Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians and of an American Jewish establishment that defends it at all cost.
RNS spoke to Beinart, who is a professor of journalism and political science at the CUNY School of Journalism, ahead of the publication of his book. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The title of your book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” rather than “Being Jewish After Oct. 7.” Explain why you chose that title.
I chose it because in the Jewish community that I’m part of, that I love, there’s been a tremendous amount of grappling with what it means to be Jewish after Oct. 7. In the dominant conversation it’s about the trauma that Jews in Israel have experienced or continue to experience and about the repercussions in terms of antisemitism and what this means for the role of Jews in the United States. But what I found very difficult and painful is that there hasn’t been a kind of reckoning with what it means for us that an entire society is being destroyed — that most of the buildings, the hospitals, the schools, the agriculture, the entire basis of life for a population of 2 million people. Why aren’t we reckoning with that? Why doesn’t that haunt us? Our tradition is not only a tribal tradition that asks us to think only about ourselves. And so my book is partly about why it is that I don’t feel that in the organized American Jewish community, we’ve been willing to have that conversation sufficiently.
You offer a complex reading of Jewish narratives that goes beyond a tale of eternal victimhood. But can that story really change?
I do think you see a greater appetite among younger American Jews to think in those terms. One of the things that gives me hope in this moment of horror and despair is that I think there’s going to be a tremendous amount of Jewish creativity that comes from younger American Jews who look at what resources we have in our own tradition that can be fodder for us to confront these things and to think about our ethical responsibilities in a situation in which (Israeli) Jews are not legally subjugated as they were in Europe and other places, but indeed do have legal supremacy. I think there’s a lot in our tradition that offers us … more complicated stories that allow us to see ourselves in a range of different capacities, not simply in the role of the victim whose obligation is merely to survive.
What was your Jewish background like?
I grew up in a traditional environment of South African Jewish immigrants where there was not a deep religious reserve. (Religious practice) is something that I came to in my adulthood, starting in my 20s. Our tradition refers to the Talmud as the sea, and just swimming, you never reach the shore. I sometimes feel like I’m still in the wading pool. I’ve not even gotten anywhere near the deep end of the pool. But I’ve been doing Daf Yomi, which is where you study a page of Talmud each day, for the last five years.
It’s important to say that Judaism, like any religion, has many, many voices. Some of them might speak about human dignity, and others might sound, not just tribal but even genocidal. I don’t think anyone should try to make a claim that Judaism has some essentially progressive element in it. But I do think we all inevitably take from Jewish tradition the things that speak most powerfully to us. And so one of the things that speaks very powerfully to me is just something very simple, which is the fact that Torah does not begin with the Jewish family, with Abraham. The first human beings that we were introduced to in Torah are Adam, Eve and Noah, who are not Jews. They’re actually members of no tribe. They’re universal human beings. There is this great line from the Torah which said that basically, human beings are created from one ancestor so that no one can say that my father is greater than your father, that my family is superior to yours. That’s one element that in practice would help us think differently about our moral obligations.
Have you seen people change their minds about Israel and be more open to criticizing it?
The thing I have seen have the biggest impact on people is interactions with Palestinians. When people have the opportunity to have a human interaction with Palestinians under conditions of relative equality, people are confronted with the fact that they — and I was confronted with this myself — carry around a lot of dehumanizing ideas about Palestinians. They’re described as this kind of faceless mass of threatening people who want to kill Jews. And then you meet individual people and you find they’re human beings, and they’re every bit as thoughtful and quirky and sophisticated and funny, or whatever. And I think it’s that shock of recognition of genuine Palestinian humanity that allows me to start imagining, ‘Oh my gosh, those people in Gaza or those people in the West Bank, it could be me and my kids.’ And I think that’s what human interaction can do.
But unfortunately, we have a Jewish community in which it’s still very unusual for a synagogue or a Jewish school to invite a Palestinian speaker to come or to assign a book by a Palestinian or a film, and obviously in Israel, even though you have certain kinds of interactions between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, so often they are under conditions of radical and even brutal inequality. There are exceptions, of course, but oftentimes they don’t allow the humanizing interaction that I think can make people change their minds.
What advice do you have for Jews who feel incredibly alienated from their synagogues’ unstinting support for Israel?
I guess I have two different thoughts. The first is that it’s not a difficult religion in which to create your own community of prayer and study. And so if you don’t find one speaks to you spiritually and morally, then create your own. We are beginning to see a real renaissance of different kinds of Jewish religious spaces that are partly being created out of alienation with the moral fit of many mainstream religious institutions.
But I would also say that I personally don’t think that one should think about a religious institution as primarily serving a political function. I think there is also a value in being a part of a space that can contain people with political differences who share other things — a love of Torah, a connection to one another around prayer. I don’t necessarily feel like I need to go to a synagogue where people are expressing my political views. But what I do find problematic is when people use a kind of nationalist commitment, in which Israel becomes a kind of surrogate god, and they kind of elevate that as more important than an engagement with Jewish texts, and I think sometimes in certain American synagogue environments that does tend to happen.
How do you advise Jews to evaluate reports of rampant antisemitism?
Part of the challenge in evaluating, combating antisemitism is that we have competing definitions, especially as it relates to Palestinians. So, the organized American Jewish community tends to say if you challenge the moral legitimacy of a Jewish state, that is antisemitism. I disagree. To me, it’s perverse actually, because the essence of bigotry is that it’s an assault on human equality. So if you oppose what the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, calls Jewish legal supremacy in the name of equality under the law, that’s not bigotry, it’s the opposite of bigotry. Now, if you say, no, I want there to be an Islamic state in which Jews live as subordinates, or I want Israeli Jews to be forced to leave or persecuted, yes, that is antisemitism. There are other ways you could be antisemitic — you claim that Israel is responsible for COVID or Israel runs the world economy or it’s responsible for climate change or kind of play into these historic tropes about Jews as these shadowy malevolent figures that run the world, yes, that’s antisemitism. But I think part of the challenge in evaluating and combating antisemitism is that we have the mainstream American Jewish community peddling a definition of antisemitism that I think is very problematic.
Do you see any sign of hope right now in the United States as well as Israel?
I guess the things that give me hope are the fact that there is a movement growing in the United States and around the world. It’s not a perfect movement. But there’s a movement for Palestinian solidarity that recognizes that certain people are being treated unfairly, and I think it has the capacity to be one of the great moral movements — like the movement against Vietnam and for civil rights and against apartheid — that brings together people of all different backgrounds around a common principle.
Right after the war started, groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace were doing these protests on civil disobedience, I would go on social media and I watched the responses of people coming from the Arab or Muslim worlds saying something along the lines of, “This shows that we are not in a struggle of Jews against Muslims or Jews against Palestinians. This is a struggle against oppression.” That was very profoundly moving and gave me hope.
