Being Jewish after Gaza: Peter Beinart's 'reckoning' is a bid to rehabilitate Zionism

Peter Beinart's latest book, 'Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza', makes for a perplexing read (Azad Essa/MEE)

"In the story of Jewish liberation, Beinart says it's time
for a new story for the Jewish people - one in which they can be oppressors, too.

'We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world," Beinart writes in his prologue, adding that the "book is about the stories Jews tell ourselves that blind us to Palestinian suffering.

It's about how we came to value a state, Israel,
above the lives of all the people who live under its control.'

But the book is not really about that."

In the summer of 2010, the prominent Jewish American writer Peter Beinart dropped a bombshell on America's liberal elite.

He observed, as Israel continued to build illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and completed the first round of what it called "mowing the lawn" - the name given to the periodic bombing of Gaza - that attitudes towards Israel were dramatically shifting among young American Jews.

The winds were changing, Beinart noted in the New York Review of Books.

"Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral," he wrote.

He cautioned that the American Jewish establishment's refusal to change track on Israel's brutal occupation of the occupied territories would alienate young Jewish Americans from the Israeli state.

The noted Jewish American scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote in his book Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End that as an observant Orthodox New York Jew and renowned establishment liberal with deep ties to both the mainstream media (he was the former editor of The New Republic) as well as the Democratic Party elite, "Beinart's high profile defection signaled the further decomposition of American Zionism, this time at its hard core."

A few years later, Beinart would expand on his views with the book The Crisis of Zionism (Picador), in which he described Israeli policies against the Palestinians as threatening to "destroy the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals".

He called on American Jews "to defend the dream of a democratic Jewish state before it is too late."

But as Israel repeatedly bombed Gaza, settlements in the occupied West Bank expanded, and normalisation deals in the form of the Abraham Accords occurred, Beinart was forced to conclude in 2020 that democracy was incongruous with Jewish supremacy.

Instead, he began advocating the idea of a one-state solution in which the Jews and Palestinians would live together in a bi-national state.

"Now liberal Zionists must make our decision, too. It's time to abandon the traditional two-state solution and embrace the goal of equal rights for Jews and Palestinians," he wrote in The New York Times, another harbinger of mainstream liberal opinion.

Sections of the progressive left welcomed his acknowledgement that a Jewish supremacist state is antithetical to democratic values, but to critical Palestinian scholars and radical observers, Beinart was still way behind the curve.

"Beinart's prognosis fails to identify what the problem really is: not 1967, but rather 1948 and Zionism itself as a settler-colonial, racial project," Lana Tatour wrote at the time.

"It was not Palestinians who introduced the logic of racial separation between Jews and Palestinians in Palestine that Beinart asks to fix; it was Zionism," Tatour wrote, adding that Beinart had not abandoned the two-state solution because he had found Zionism to be the problem, "but rather due to an ambition to remake liberal Zionism into something that true liberal Zionists, like himself, can live with".

In other words, Beinart hadn't abandoned Zionism. He had merely modified his understanding of it.

'A reckoning'

After the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel began a project of annihilation in Gaza.

Through indiscriminate and targeted attacks on homes, hospitals and refugee camps, along with the systematic denial of food, aid and medical supplies, large swathes of the Gaza Strip were reduced to rubble.

In his new book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf), Beinart writes that he watched in horror as the destruction meted out on Palestinians in Gaza came with the consent of many Jews around the world.

Conservative estimates put the Palestinian death toll close to 50,000, with tens of thousands more either missing, orphaned or maimed.

"I've struggled with the way many Jews - including people I cherish - have justified the destruction of an entire society," he writes.

The book - 117 pages (with an additional 55 pages of notes) - laments the purported reasons why so many American Jews have either ignored, justified, or applauded (his words) as Gaza has endured a genocide over the past year and a half.

Divided into five chapters, a prologue, and an author's "note to a former friend", Beinart traces the story of Jewish liberation - told through parables from the Torah interwoven with Israel's history of oppression - to illustrate how so many Jews have found ways to focus primarily on their victimhood as a means to deny their ability to oppress, too.

It is also an appeal to his Jewish compatriots to reconsider their fanatical position on the state they cherish called Israel.

In his "note to a former friend", with whom Beinart claims stopped talking with him over his stance on Gaza, he writes: "I know my public opposition to this war - and to the very idea of a state that favours Jews over Palestinians - constitutes a betrayal of our people."

The opening lines are instructive and, like much of the book, befuddled and perplexing.

Not only does it set the tone for a book heaving with indecision, but it puts into motion Beinart's argument that treats Zionism as a given, erases historical Jewish opposition to Zionism, and gives credence to a Jewish claim over Palestine.

Ayman Mohyeldin interviews Peter Beinart at the launch of the book on 29 January 2025 (Azad Essa/MEE) 

Nonetheless, Beinart briefly examines the birth of Zionism and Israel amid a wave of European antisemitism. In his retelling, he is not shy to flag the colonial vocabulary of Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, or the blatant supremacist views of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the precursor of the far-right movement in Israel.

He demonstrates, too, how Zionists seamlessly shifted from describing their task as "virtuous colonisation" when it held currency to "virtuous victims" when colonialism became a dirty word.

In his extrapolation of "the new antisemitism", in which he explains how criticism of Israel is deliberately conflated with antisemitism, Beinart spends time examining the pro-Palestine student protests that swept across the US in 2024 and the claims that Jews felt unsafe during the movement.

He mourns international Jewry turning the state of Israel into an object of idolatry, and underlines the absurdity that critiquing Israel had become more sacrilegious than debating Judaism itself.

The university student group Hillel, Beinart notes, describes Israel "as a core element of Jewish life".

"In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself," Beinart says.

But has he managed to break free of the spell of Zionism himself?

It soon becomes apparent that Beinart, his empathy and consideration for Palestinians notwithstanding, is searching for a new way to tell an old story.

A question of language

In the days following the 7 October attacks, Beinart admits that his emotions gave way to his tribalist impulses.

He writes that he would look around for speeches or articles from the anti-war left to look for condemnation of the murder of Israeli civilians. He said he often couldn't find them. It disappointed him.

When members of the Israeli government began invoking the biblical story of Amalek to dehumanise Palestinians or comparing Palestinians to Nazis to help build up Western consensus to bombard Gaza, he writes he "understood where these comparisons come from".

For someone who has known about the inhumane decade-and-a-half-long siege of Gaza, in which even vegetables needed sign-off from the Israelis to get into the enclave, Beinart appears to think that his love for Jewish life absolves him from reacting responsibly to the events of 7 October. Consider a Substack post he wrote back in late October 2023, some 18 days after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

Around 7,000 Palestinians had already been killed, and close to 18,500 others had been injured by 25 October, but this didn't stop Beinart from appealing to the pro-Palestine left to "affirm the lives and humanity of Israeli Jews" who had been taken captive by Hamas just as the Jews needed "to have courage to fight for Palestinian freedom and Palestinian equality".

This false equivalence of the Israeli state machine with Palestinians is a stunning illustration of either Beinart's refusal or inability to comprehend the genocidal nature of Zionism fully.

Instead of embarking on course correction, Beinart continues with this line of thought in the book when discussing pro-Palestine activists' slogans or the student movement on campuses.

"I wish more pro-Palestinian activists had clearly committed themselves to the rules of war," he writes in one section when he describes the supposed silence of the left over the 7 October attack.

On slogans, he argues, "Given what Israel has done, pro-Israel slogans like 'Israel has a right to defend itself' and 'I stand with the IDF' are at least as ominous as 'intifada' or "resistance'".

On the Palestinian use of the phrase "From the river to the sea", which Palestinians have repeatedly described as an aspiration for freedom, Beinart fixates on Zionist anxieties around it being a call to throw Israelis into the sea.

He invariably offers a placid but jarring "there's no way to prove who's right" on the meaning of the phrase.

Given the rising threat of sanction and arrest over the use of the phrase, Beinart should know that his ambiguity helps buttress the peril faced by pro-Palestinian protesters who dare to use it.

Likewise, when addressing the question of 'the new antisemitism' - one that conflates the critique of Zionism with antisemitism - Beinart muddles the experience of the pro-Palestine student protest movement by purposely using individual examples of Jewish Zionist students' discomfort with the pro-Palestine movement as a means to placate Zionist claims of rampant antisemitism on campuses.

"Several Jewish students told me they feared being ostracised if they openly supported Israel," he writes, adding later: "Jews have become the latest in a long line of Americans to suffer because we are associated with a foreign country that some other Americans hate."

But are Zionist Jews in America suffering because of the genocide in Gaza?

One would be hard-pressed to find even a single example of a pro-Israel supporter losing employment, funding or academic opportunity due to their support for Israel. Beinart's account is summarily rejected by anti-Zionist Jewish students who were part and parcel of the pro-Palestine protests across the country.

His approach here is not just inaccurate, it is also immensely damaging.

In a context in which Jewish Zionist students have enjoyed the support of university administrators, the donor class, and the state - from the White House to the police - Beinart's suggestion that Jewish Americans as a community were still victims at this time even as they attacked, blacklisted and helped criminalise pro-Palestine students, resulting in student suspensions, arrests and even professors being harassed and fired, reads like a parody.

It's not that Beinart doesn't mention that pro-Palestine students are more likely to face punitive action for their activism. It's rather his insistence to gently equivocate that both sides have made mistakes or struggled or need to prioritise engagement when one side is urgently protesting for an end to a genocide - openly supported and lobbied for by the other - that makes his argument simply untenable.

As one Jewish American student said to me at Tufts: "As anti-Zionist Jews - instead of parading around respectability politics and critiquing the language the Palestinians use to oppose the genocide that is being inflicted on them, we need to be trying to fight Zionism within our Jewish communities."

Hence, by making these concessions periodically, Beinart signals to his Jewish Zionist readers that he hasn't abandoned them.

The South African model

Beinart was born in the US in 1971 to Jewish immigrants from South Africa, where he spent several of his formative years living during the apartheid era.

Growing up in a liberal household - his father was an architecture professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) while his mother headed up a human rights film programme at Harvard - he graduated from Yale in 1993 and was catapulted to managing editor of The New Republic by 1995.

It is at the magazine that he appears to have consolidated a resolute belief in American exceptionalism.

Under his stewardship, The New Republic supported the Iraq War in 2003. An editorial in 2004 (still during his tenure) read: "We feel regret, but no shame." Later, in 2010, he wrote The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris about his error in supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Never mind the grotesque error of supporting the war on Iraq, it is his first book in 2006, The Good Fight: Why Liberals - and Only Liberals - Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (HarperCollins), that is particularly insightful.

In it, Beinart seeks to push liberals, or, more specifically, the Democratic Party, into embracing the civilising quest of the so-called "war on terror".

The book compares the threat posed by totalitarian regimes in the 1950s with what he refers to incessantly as "jihadis".

"America badly needs an alternative vision - rooted in the liberal tradition - for fighting global jihad ... And yet the liberalism emerging today denies that fighting global jihad should even be a priority," he writes.

The book is feverishly jingoistic and militaristic and reads like a far-right Islamophobic manifesto. It also accepts that industrial violence was an acceptable method to construct the world in America's vision.

"It would be naive, however, to think that freedom, even broadly defined, and pursued with generosity and humility, is enough to defeat jihadism ... no amount of aid or investment will help unless someone restablishes order," he adds.

But as the story goes, as a self-described liberal Zionist for most of his life, a visit to the occupied West Bank in his mid-30s changed his approach to Israel.

Beinart moved from being a self-assured Zionist who believed that Israel could be both democratic and Jewish, to the "new" conclusion that Israel was, in fact, an apartheid state built to further Jewish supremacy.

But he was not able to let go of Zionism. And, as would become increasingly clear, he was unable to shake off a deep commitment to liberalism, as the settler-colonial scholar Tatour identified at the time.

In 2021, Beinart described himself as a "cultural Zionist" who followed a subset of thinkers who believed in the Jewish connection to the land of Palestine, but not necessarily the creation of a Jewish state on the land.

In his new book exploring a Jewish reckoning after the destruction of Gaza, he builds on the thesis, though he is very careful with his words.

Whereas Beinart discusses far-right Zionist anxieties around describing Zionism as a settler-colonial project, Beinart neither defines himself nor offers a compelling definition of Zionism.

He opts instead to return to the Bible and offer a pithy "Jews have an ancient and profound spiritual connection to the land" to stake a claim to remaining on the land.

When I questioned Beinart at his book launch in New York City about how invoking this spiritual reference to the land differed from Zionism, he said the connection "was not a creation of Zionism; it suffuses Jewish texts". He added there was nothing wrong with feeling a connection to the land, whether it was a Jewish connection to Israel or Afrikaaners in South Africa, "as long as it is not a justification for supremacy".

But it's unclear then how Beinart expects Zionists - raised on a diet of racism and hatred towards Palestinians - to relinquish supremacy in Israel while simultaneously believing in a special biblical connection to the land.

"I think what bothers me the most about the flaccid 'cultural' Zionist argument that Peter attempts to put forth is that it's just Zionism mutated and repackaged to suit the times," Amanda Gelender, an anti-Zionist Jewish writer, told me.

"It's Jewish colonisers getting to keep at least some portion of their stolen spoils on the land that they have pillaged and decimated. He's engaging in Zionist worldbuilding," Gelender added.

In essence, the argument does appear to be Beinart's attempt to provide Jewish Zionists with a blueprint for an escape from accountability for the crimes in Palestine.

In so doing, Beinart uses the South African example to offer assurances to assuage the anxieties of Jewish Zionists' fear of entering the abyss.

In South Africa, the apartheid regime that lasted 46 years - but built upon the back of exploitative British and Dutch colonialism for several hundred years - ended with white South Africans being allowed to keep their property and resources.

"When oppressed people gain a voice in government, they gain another way of speaking to those in power, one that doesn't risk their lives," he writes.

Under the facade of western liberal democracy, there is the promise of equality and justice and the perennial excuse of imperfection.

But other than a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there was no real accountability or reparations for Black South Africans.

South Africa merely entered the global economy with Black South Africans carrying little more than a right to vote along with the clothes on their backs. Today, South Africa is among the most unequal countries in the world.

In other words, white South Africans merely gave up their institutionalised supremacy as enshrined in the law. But did white South Africans give up their supremacist views?

Their economic prowess still provided them the privilege to live in better neighbourhoods, attend better schools, make a better living, and walk on properly paved roads.

White South Africans still own much of the country's land, and dominate upper management in private companies. One report found that white South Africans occupied 65.9 percent of top management-level posts, while Black people occupied just 13.8 percent.

For Israeli Jews to give up on Jewish supremacy without accountability and reparations would be a coup. They stand to lose nothing.

"So what Beinart is claiming here is that Jews have an attachment to the land that is really no different than the many different kinds of attachments to the lands of many different kinds of peoples throughout history," Siraj Ahmed, a professor in the English Department of the City University of New York, told me.

"What he's not acknowledging is that this is the attachment to the land of colonisers. And he's implying that if we can simply cleanse Jews of their Jewish supremacy, they would have every right to remain on the land. He's not acknowledging that what is intrinsic to the Zionist presence on the land is racism. There's no claim to that land - where another people are living in their own political formations - that is not racist," Ahmed added.

Beinart also appears to ignore another facet of the South African experience.

When South Africa dragged Israel to the International Court of Justice, it was Jewish Zionists and many white South Africans who opposed the move to hold Israel accountable.

Whereas it may be a faux pas to express white supremacy in South Africa today, supporting Israel was perfectly acceptable.

In fact, in the movement to raise the issue of Palestine in South Africa, white South Africans - an emphatic and visible community in the country - are among the few.

'An old-new story'

In the story of Jewish liberation, Beinart says it's time for a new story for the Jewish people - one in which they can be oppressors, too.

"We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world," Beinart writes in his prologue, adding that the "book is about the stories Jews tell ourselves that blind us to Palestinian suffering. It's about how we came to value a state, Israel, above the lives of all the people who live under its control."

But the book is not really about that.

Even if you are able to overlook Beinart's decision to centre Jews at this moment - for surely interrogating what it means to be Jewish as the Jewish state embarks on a project of annihilation of another people is excruciatingly narcissistic at best - the book itself is a motley collection of illogical reasoning and conclusions.

Whereas Beinart looks to provide a rational and religious argument as to how, why and when the Jewish people lost track of their oppressive Zionist project, the book is really his attempt to provide Jews or Jewish Zionists an escape route from what they have perpetuated on Palestinians.

Beinart's book is an extension of his experimental thought process that began more than a decade ago in the pages of the New York Review of Books, and later in Jewish Currents and The New York Times, when he purportedly became the de facto spokesperson for mainstream liberal American Jews. It's a role he has relished and appears unwillingly to relinquish even as he lags behind many young anti-Zionist Jews pushing more imaginative ways of ending Israel's occupation.

Rather than taking the issue back to the question of Zionism, which is the need of the hour, he instead sidesteps it and goes on to wrap the discussion in neatly written hubris that ends up at the same place he had ended up years back.

Where is the reckoning? There is none. So, what does it mean to be Jewish after the destruction of Gaza?

For Beinart, it's just like it was after the war in Iraq: there's regret, but not enough shame.