“The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel is dangerously wrong… It is based on a vicious lie: that Israel is a colonial presence in the Middle East,” states the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox Jewish communities within the U.K. and British Commonwealth. He speaks these words in his voiceover of a 2017 animated video titled “Why is it important to understand and oppose the BDS campaign?” In the six-minute video, Sacks claims that BDS is motivated by antisemitism, repeats Zionist myths about the Nakba, and blames Palestinians for the failure of the so-called peace process. His stately narration is accompanied by crude illustrations of Palestinian men portrayed as the Orientalist archetype of the Islamist terrorist and Palestinian women as oppressed hijabis. Despite the liberal Zionist assertion that he supports a future Palestinian state, Sacks’s message is clear: that future should be solely determined by Israel.
It’s telling, then, that Peter Beinart, the former poster boy for liberal Zionism and now editor-at-large of the journal Jewish Currents, chooses a Jonathan Sacks quote—“Judaism is about the universality of justice but the particularity of love”—as an epigraph to his muddled new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. Despite his public remonstrations of Israel and Zionism, Beinart’s book reveals his indebtedness to liberal Zionist ideology, as well as his inability to see how the “particularity” of his love for Zionists—regardless of the crimes against humanity they’ve committed—is fundamentally at odds with a “universality of justice.”
Though framed as a book about “what comes after” this genocide, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza presents us with little original thinking: the manuscript was opportunistically sold to a publisher just five months into the now 15-month assault on Gaza and its people (which is in fact still ongoing, in Israel’s egregious defiance of the declared ceasefire). What can a book composed of facts about the Israeli occupation of Palestine—as true today as they were on October 6th, 2023, but with a sprinkling about Gaza and October 7th for relevance—tell us about Jewish life? More importantly, why is Jewish existentialism Beinart’s primary concern? The Jewish state has just livestreamed the murder of at least 47,000 Palestinians (a count which will be many thousands higher when all martyrs—including those still buried under the rubble—are counted, and the genocidal tactics of starvation, medicide, and forced homelessness are taken into account).
Israel has destroyed nearly all major medical, religious, civil service, and educational infrastructure in Gaza. It has pushed the Strip to the brink of famine, forcing Palestinians to eat animal feed, weeds, and hay. It has displaced more than two million people, most of whom are descendants of refugees from Israel’s original ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-48. The anticipatory nature of Beinart’s book (both in its imagined ending of Gaza and its people and in its sale during an ongoing genocide, which it is framed as viewing retroactively), as well as with its emphasis on the Jewish experience of committing genocide, makes this book a dehumanizing exercise in Zionist thought.
Beinart may protest that he is an ally to Palestinians—he has called for an end to Israeli apartheid and advocated for a one-state solution—but he offers no compelling reason for them to trust him. In the preface, “A Note to My Former Friend,” Beinart addresses an ardent Zionist who believes that Beinart has betrayed the Jewish people by his criticism of Israel. But rather than accepting political incommensurability, Beinart instead offers tenderness, even writing that his former friend’s Zionist fanaticism is what has “sustained our people in a pitiless world.”
At the end of the preface, Beinart expresses his hope that the rupture with his former friend will be temporary: a sentiment supported by his assertion, in the following chapter, that he is ultimately a “Jewish loyalist” and that “Jews are an extended family.” Because it’s cloaked in the same language of self-victimization that Beinart later decries in the book, I want to be clear about what he’s saying in this opening salvo. Not only is Beinart empathizing with the ideological fanaticism of a Zionist, but he is leaving open the door for a continued relationship with them. Nowhere does Beinart indicate that the beliefs of Zionists are too beyond the pale for him; instead, it is the Zionists who reject Beinart, who in turn is ready to welcome them back into his life. With a standing invitation to be in community with those committing a genocide against them, why should Palestinians trust a word that passes through Beinart’s mouth?
Ironically, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza has very little to say about the subject of its title. Beinart’s primary focus is on the “story” that modern Jewry tells about itself in the present, which he describes as a narrative of eternal victimhood (a tendency first articulated as the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” by Salo Baron in 1928). Beinart argues that although Zionism employs a transhistoric conception of Jewish victimhood as a bulwark against criticism, Jewish tradition is rife with other roles that Jews have occupied, including that of the oppressor; to illustrate his point, he turns to the Book of Esther’s ending, in which the Jews of Persia mercilessly slaughter 75,000 of their enemies in one day, as well as the Maccabees of the Hanukkah story, who, as the Hasmonean dynasty, eventually become a corrupt force in the Second Temple period. According to Beinart’s theory, if contemporary Jewry can tell a different story about itself, one in which it is possible for Jews to oppress others, they’ll recognize the truth about Israel’s horrors and end its oppression of Palestine.
But not every narrator is trustworthy. Beinart’s writing is indebted to the liberal belief that if evil is revealed, all will rise and stand against it. But this is little more than wishful naieveté; it does not comport with the political reality of the world, in which Zionists are not only aware of, but actively revel in the indiscriminate murder perpetrated at the hands of their military forces. Nor does it account for cynical uses of narrative and the crassly ideological instrumentalization of Jewish culture and history. The issue, as revealed in the most overt and violent way possible in Gaza, is not one of insufficient evidence for genocide. It isn’t that Zionists don’t know other stories about Judaism, or that they are trapped in the narrative rut of a single story—it’s that they’ve stuck with the story of Jewish victimhood because, so far, it’s worked.
Curiously, while he pays lip service to minor differences between American and Israeli audiences, Beinart primarily speaks about world Jewry without distinction. This is refreshing, but not in the way Beinart intends. His slippage between Judaism and Zionism points to a reality on the ground: that for most purposes, it’s impossible to separate the two. In the wake of October 7, as Israel began its attack on Gaza, there was a push among many anti-Zionist Jews, myself included, to articulate a distinction between Jewishness as a religious or ethnic identity and Zionism as a 19th-century colonial and ethnonationalist movement. This was a political strategy: anti-Zionist Jews wanted to provide the public with a language that would allow them to criticize Israel, while sidestepping the conservative trap of antisemitism. But what was true then, and even truer now, is that a neat bifurcation of Judaism and Zionism is neither possible nor politically useful.
How can anti-Zionist Jews insist on an absolute distinction between Zionism and Judaism when, in the centers of world Jewry (North America and Israel), official Jewish denominational practice and communal life is completely captured by Zionist ideology? This is certainly not to say that Judaism and Zionism are, in all senses, commensurate or reducible to each other. But it is a call to acknowledge their thorough entanglement.
Beinart’s own writing points to this inextricability. In Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, he writes on how the American Jewish Committee, the grandaddy of Jewish communal organizations in the United States, “rebut[s] the claim that Israel is a settler-colonial state” and describes Israel as the land which “God promises…to Abraham, the first Jew.” He quotes Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a once-progressive non-profit that now facilitates U.S. police training in Israel, as asserting that “Zionism is fundamental to Judaism.” He reports on how American Jewish lobbyists have supported legislation that criminalizes BDS—legislation which is surely unconstitutional.
“In establishment American Jewish circles, supporting Israel is depicted not as a political choice but as an inherent part of being a Jew,” he writes. This is true financially as well: The Jewish Federations of North America, which represents and runs Jewish communal life in 350 cities, raised more than $850 million for Israel following October 7th. On college campuses, Jewish life is dominated by Hillel, where speakers who ‘delegitimize Jewish statehood are explicitly prohibited from speaking.” All major religious denominations—Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox—are pro-Israel. “Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it’s not clear what is left,” Beinart concludes.
And yet, after laying out all the evidence of Zionism and Judaism’s enmeshment, Beinart returns to rigid lines of distinction when objecting to anti-Zionist criticism of American Jewish support for Israel. “Americans are not responsible for foreign governments or organizations just because they have a common ancestry,” he writes, continuing: “It’s precisely because Judaism and the State of Israel are separate that Jews should not be blamed for Israel’s actions.” But how do those blanket statements relate to the earlier reality he describes?
I agree with Beinart that any given Jewish person walking down the street should not be held personally accountable for the actions of the Israeli state, but his defensive posture leaves no room to hold American Jewish communities and organizations accountable for their actions. “Jews are never responsible for antisemitism,” Beinart argues. But in his analysis, any criticism of Jews as a group by a non-Jew constitutes antisemitism. So long as anti-Zionist Jews insist on an absolute distinction between Zionism and Judaism, and prohibit speaking about the political, material, and ideological support that Jewish communal life provides Israel, Zionists will continue their subjugation of Palestinians under the cover of protection Judaism offers.
Perhaps the place where Beinart is most indebted to Zionist thinking is in his discussion of Palestinian armed resistance. Here, Palestinians are a “problem” to be solved and a demographic to be managed. Beinart’s starting point is the claim that Palestinian and Israeli safety is interconnected—a syllogism I’ve always found disingenuous when, as is the case with Beinart, it’s not immediately followed by an explanation of how that entwinement came to be: namely, Zionist settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing.
Though he recognizes that, as an occupied people, Palestinian resistance is fundamentally different from the state-sanctioned violence of Israel, Beinart nevertheless recapitulates the Zionist belief that Palestinian armed struggle is either motivated by a desire for “revenge” or a nameless force that is easily recognizable as antisemitism. Despite offering evidence that Palestinian support for armed resistance is not static, but instead ebbs and flows based on the possible conditions for freedom, Beinart claims that “Israeli oppression isn’t the only cause of Palestinian violence.” The reader is left to fill in the other cause: antisemitism.
Later, after again laying out the ways in which non-violent resistance has been criminalized by both the United States and Israel through military, legislative, economic, and diplomatic means, Beinart claims that “America and Israel’s relentless quashing of more peaceful Palestinian initiatives did not cause the October 7 massacre.” If not the original problem of Zionist colonization, and the following 77 years of Israeli aggression aided by the United States, then what did cause October 7th? Beinart’s formulation again asks the reader to supply the other cause: antisemitism. Despite his own argument that Palestinians are not inherently violent or prone to violence, Beinart nevertheless reduces Palestinians to a “safety” concern to be managed by the Israeli state. Nowhere does Beinart engage with extant Palestinian political writing on armed resistance; an analysis of Palestinian armed struggle and its political aims, as described by Palestinian writers, activists, and militants, remains unexamined.
If the preceding chapters weren’t muddled enough, Beinart’s final chapter makes a full dive into mawkish incoherence. Recounting other geographies of colonial and racial struggle—South Africa, the North of Ireland, and the United States—Beinart makes the shocking suggestion that Jews should learn from the oppressive forces in each of these contexts:
“The most important thing we can learn from white South Africans, white southerners, and Protestants in Northern Ireland is… that abandoning supremacy offers a chance at liberation. ‘Many white southerners felt that the civil rights years had removed a great burden from their shoulders,’ writes [Jason] Sokol. ‘The weight of a long and bloody past seemed to be lifting.”
And what of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and redlining in the United States, the ongoing colonial nature of British occupation in the North of Ireland, and the afterlives of apartheid-era segregation in South Africa? If a weight has been lifted from the shoulders of the oppressors, it is only a feeling of guilt—colonial violence continues to bear down on the oppressed in all of these places. In an inversion of moral priorities, Beinart turns the genocide of Gaza into an opportunity for Jewish redemption, a chance to “lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world.” Yet again in Beinart’s writing, Palestinians are reduced to an object of rhetorical and emotional use, and here specifically a tool for Jewish self-realization. In Beinart’s vision, Jews will confidently go forward from committing genocide to “liberating ourselves from supremacy so, as partners with Palestinians, we can help liberate the world.”
There’s a word that describes this type of writing: narcissism. It certainly takes chutzpah to make another’s suffering about you—but it’s outright pathological to recast another people’s obliteration at the hands of your religion as a chance to redeem yourself. The truth that Beinart cannot face is that there is no prize to be won here, no silver lining to the thousands of Palestinians blown to pieces by Israeli-American bombs. There is only shame: shame that the world allows Israel—with the support of the international Jewish community—to commit such atrocities. Until Palestine and Palestinians are free from Jewish supremacy, there is no after to imagine. There is only now, when people of conscience should support Palestinians as they liberate Palestine, by any means necessary. ♦