Latest news with #Beinart
New York Times
13-04-2025
- General
- New York Times
Books About Gaza and Israel and Jewish American Identity in Crisis
According to the version of Jewish history that I grew up with, Jews are not people like everyone else. This idea would never have been stated so succinctly, but many Jewish children were given to understand that we were special. An American Jewish child, Philip Roth once told an Israeli audience, inherited 'no body of learning and no language and, finally, no Lord — which seems to me a significant thing to be missing.' Instead, one got a psychology. 'And the psychology can be translated into three words — 'Jews are better.' This is what I knew from the beginning: Somehow Jews were better. I'm saying this as a point of psychology; I'm not pronouncing it as a fact.' If our history had been ghastly, persecution had come with a compensation, bequeathing us a unique sensitivity to injustice, a determination to heal the world arising from a purer set of motives that had perdured even in the absence of faith, as well as a dispensation from the rules that govern the behavior of other people. This is the narrative that the journalist Peter Beinart confronts in the opening pages of BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A Reckoning (Knopf, 172 pp., $26). The book is addressed to a progressive friend with whom Beinart has fallen out. After Oct. 7, he writes, 'one of our closest family friends asked my wife whether we believed that Israel bore any responsibility for the carnage. She answered yes. He said he would never speak to us again.' Every Jewish person who has spoken out on Palestine has such a friend, someone who believes that Jewish virtue translates into Israeli virtue, and exempts that state from the normal laws of humanity. '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. 'Its central element should be this: We are not history's permanent virtuous victims. We are not hard-wired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense.' For years, and at great personal cost, Beinart has been one of the most influential Jewish voices for Palestine, even as he continues to attend a predominantly Zionist Orthodox synagogue. Beinart is often praised as courageous for speaking out on this subject, but the most courageous thing about him might just be his simple assertion that Jews might be 'fallible human beings.' Beinart used to describe himself as a 'liberal Zionist,' a position he has since left behind. He is sympathetic to the Jewish sense of vulnerability — he offers a granular accounting of the Hamas attacks — while nevertheless condemning the Israeli state. 'Again and again, we are ordered to accept a Jewish state's 'right to exist,'' he says, arguing that 'the legitimacy of a Jewish state — like the holiness of the Jewish people — is conditional on how it behaves.' Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
13-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Purim is not a celebration of slaughter, but of survival against attempted genocide
Peter Beinart's claims that the festival of Purim somehow demonstrates a Jewish embrace of zealotry and is an example of 'the evil that Jews commit', (11 March) is an insidious attempt to cast Jewish history and identity as heartless and vengeful. Purim is not a celebration of retribution or slaughter, but of survival against attempted genocide. The Book of Esther repeatedly emphasises that even when the Jews of Persia were finally granted the right to take up arms against those across the empire of its day who sought their destruction, they took no spoils, precisely because they were motivated not by a desire for revenge or the thrill of conquest, but by self-defence. Indeed, this is why Purim is observed to this day without reference to military prowess or vengeance, but with charity for the poor, gifts of food and special meals. Beinart's astonishing attempt to present the origin of Purim as an expression of blood lust and religious zeal for the downfall of our enemies is utterly baseless and a misappropriation of the true meaning of Purim. In fact, there are many examples in Jewish tradition of precisely the opposite principle: that we may never revel in the suffering of others, even if we ourselves have previously suffered at their hands. The atrocities of 7 October and the consequent war in Gaza have caused immense human suffering, including for many innocent Palestinian civilians. The Jewish communities that I engage with around the UK and across the world are acutely aware of that fact and we long for a day when Israelis and Palestinians can live alongside one another in peace. The suggestion that we are oblivious to such suffering is false and offensive. But the implication that Jews might actively turn away from it precisely because of our Judaism crosses the line from provocative opinion journalism into hateful Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis London
Middle East Eye
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Being Jewish after Gaza: Peter Beinart's 'reckoning' is a bid to rehabilitate Zionism
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. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters 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 signalled 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 a 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 own 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 he stopped talking about 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 Judaism is a greater heresy than rejecting Zionism 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 fully comprehend the genocidal nature of Zionism. 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. What really happened at college campuses according to Jewish students Read More » "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. South Africans in Israel: A home away from home for white colonialists Read More » "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? Why so many white South Africans are reluctant to support Palestine Read More » 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 Jewish 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.
The Guardian
27-01-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘A moral wreckage that we need to face': Peter Beinart on being Jewish after Gaza's destruction
Peter Beinart has spent a lifetime talking about Palestine and Israel. In the early 2000s he was regarded as among Israel's most prominent American defenders. He has since broken with just about every tenet commonly associated with Zionism – from rejecting the argument that Israel can be simultaneously democratic and Jewish to arguing that Palestinian refugees must be allowed to return to historic Palestine. Few people have moved as far in so short a time. A professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, Beinart once edited the New Republic and is now an editor-at-large at Jewish Currents and a contributing opinion columnist for the New York Times. He has built a reputation for being an incisive writer and public intellectual, with a knack for admitting when he's wrong – on Israel, his early support for the Iraq war and what he has described as his previous complicity in tolerating workplace sexual harassment. In Beinart's latest book, he appeals to his fellow Jews to grapple with the morality of their defense of Israel. The book, titled Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, begins with a 'note to my former friend', with whom he has broken over the issue. 'By reading these words, you have agreed to walk with me,' he writes. 'I hope to lure you beyond established boundaries.' Beinart relies on Jewish texts and draws lessons from South Africa, where his family is from, to confront Zionism and what he sees as complicity from the American Jewish establishment in Palestinian oppression. He argues for a Jewish tradition that has no use for Jewish supremacy and treats human equality as a core value. I spoke with Beinart before the declaration of a ceasefire earlier this month. I followed up to ask his view on the development. Ahmed Moor: Hi, Peter. We've all been casting about for resources and things to help us understand how the world has changed after Gaza. Your book aims to address some of that but, as the title states, it's also about 'being Jewish'. So who is the audience for the book? PB: First and foremost, I suppose it's written for my community, my friends and even my family. I live inside a pretty traditional Jewish world. And I feel like there is a kind of pathology that exists in many Jewish spaces, among people who in other aspects of their lives are humane and thoughtful. Yet when it comes to the question of Gaza, and more generally the question of Palestinians and their right to be free, a certain set of blinders come down. My hope is that I can get them to see that something has gone very profoundly wrong in the way we think about what it means to be Jewish. I felt like I needed for my own sanity to write something which addressed this moral catastrophe in the hopes that maybe I will change some people's minds. Maybe there is also a whole group of younger Jews who are themselves profoundly alienated and bewildered and deeply angry. There's a kind of moral, cultural, even theological wreckage that Jews now have to face. I want to help them think about how they rebuild. AM: I'm on the outside, but from where I sit it appears that Jews are quite divided, both politically and religiously. Yet in the book you write as though you're speaking to a single community. What are the values that anchor that community – and what happens when Israel enters the mix? PB: That's a big question. What's complicated about Judaism is that it is a religion with a universal kind of message like Christianity or Islam, but also embedded within Judaism is the metaphor of family. In the book of Genesis, you have the story of a family that in the book of Exodus becomes a people or a nation. In some ways, being Jewish can be analogous to being both Catholic and Italian, in the sense that proudly atheistic Jews still feel very intensely Jewish. It's one thing for Jews to feel these bonds of communal solidarity outside of the state framework, when they often had to depend on one another while living in states that were dangerous to them. But when you take a very powerful state and you inject that with this notion of uncritical solidarity, it leads to a series of rationalizations as that state commits what I think can be rightly called a genocide. Something terrible has gone wrong because Judaism also has a moral message. I feel like that gets lost in all of this. I think more relevant to the book is the question of how we tell a story about what it means to be Jewish that recognizes our obligations to one another, but also never loses sight of the fact that the first people created according to Torah are not Jews. All human beings are created in the image of God, and that precedes the Jewish story. What Israel has done in Gaza is the most profound desecration of the central idea of the absolute and infinite worth of every human being. And yet the organized American Jewish community acts as if Palestinians in Gaza have essentially no value. Their deaths are dismissed on the flimsiest of pretexts. These people are basically saying that the state has absolute value, but the human beings who live in this state, if they have the misfortune of being Palestinian, don't have value. AM: One of the major themes of the book is complicity. How do you perceive complicity with what Israel is doing, and has been doing for decades, within American Jewish life? PB: I think the organized American Jewish community, especially since 1967, has been built around unconditional support for Israel as a central feature of what it means to live a Jewish life. You support the basic structure of the state even though the state is fundamentally unequal and fundamentally oppressive when it comes to Palestinians. It comes in many forms. It can come in participation in a group like Aipac, which is pressuring the government to maintain unconditional US support. It can come in more symbolic ways, like a prayer for the Israel Defense Forces which is common in many American synagogues. It also comes through the unwillingness to engage with Palestinians. Most American Jewish institutions – schools, synagogues, camps, whatever – don't bring Palestinian speakers in to actually give people a genuine understanding of what Zionism looks like from the standpoint of its victims. These are all forms of complicity. AM: I've been reading your work since at least 2008. I wrote for you in 2012 at the Daily Beast when you were still recognized as a prominent liberal Zionist voice. Over the years, you've shown a willingness to change your mind and to do it publicly. Not a lot of people are willing to publicly admit they were wrong. Why do you think that is? PB: I always feel a little embarrassed when people ask me about these changes in a way that allows me to look good. The truth is that there were a lot of people who knew things much earlier that I took a long time to learn. Obviously many of them are Palestinians from whom I've learned, but there are also Jews and others. My learning process has been slow partly because of fear. I think perhaps that I was too comfortable living in an environment where I was not really exposed to many things, a relatively privileged and cloistered existence. But I've also always been afraid of what the consequences would be, career-wise and interpersonally, if I became too radically out of step with people around me. It's still something I worry about all the time. For me, there was a process of unpeeling, like an onion, that began when I first went to the West Bank more than 20 years ago. It's one thing to know in an abstract way that it's not great for Israel to be occupying people. And I kind of knew that, and I supported two states, but there was always a notion of wanting to give Israel the benefit of the doubt. But the more one looked, the more that was just unsustainable. I was also forced to confront the degree to which I had dehumanized Palestinians. I didn't think of myself as someone who did that. But I realized that I wasn't engaging with Palestinians as human beings. I was engaging with Palestinians as a kind of an abstract group of people about whom I was making various judgments. There was a real shock that came with engagement with ordinary people and the realization that these were human beings who were enduring these things that I and the people around me would never be willing to tolerate. I was able to shed the preconceptions that I was raised with, that so many Jews are raised with, about Palestinians, that they have a tendency towards violence. I was able to unlearn those things. So that has been for me an experience of liberation. That's part of what the book is about: I want other Jews to have that experience of liberation because first of all it means that we can stop being complicit in these horrors, but also we don't have to carry the burden of this fear based on dehumanizing and often racist views. AM: This is a really thorny topic, but a lot of people see overt displays of traditionally Jewish symbols as signifiers of Zionism, which is militaristic and chauvinistic in my lived experience as a Palestinian who has spent time in both Gaza and the West Bank. For example, there was that infamous story of Israeli soldiers branding the Star of David on to a detainee's face. So how do you unwind the association of Zionism with Judaism? PB: Zionism has this very strange relationship with Judaism. In one way it was a rebellion against Judaism. Normative notions of Jewish law said that Jews pray for the Messiah to come and once the Messiah comes, Jews will return to what we call the land of Israel. But then, in an era of nationalism and imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Zionist movement said: 'We are going to have our own nationalist project.' In the beginning the vast majority of Jewish religious authorities were hostile to Zionism. But then Zionism also plays on these traditional notions in Jewish texts of a connection to this place called the land of Israel. But now, Zionism in the form of Jewish ethnonationalism risks swallowing Judaism or becoming so enmeshed with it that the two cannot be distinguished. The Israeli flag is designed to look like a tallit, the prayer shawl that Jews wear when they pray. It has the star of David, a traditional Jewish symbol. The menorah is also used in Israeli symbols. Jews want opponents of Zionism to make this distinction – I don't want people to go up to a Jew on the street who is wearing a kippah or some Jewish symbol and make that person responsible for what the state of Israel does. Yet at the same time, Jewish leaders in America are constantly conflating these two things by saying Zionism is inherent in Judaism. On the one hand, they say, supporting the state of Israel is inherent in being Jewish. On the other, they're asking the anti-Zionist or pro-Palestine activist to live up to a standard that they themself violate. Many American Jews will decide they want to be Zionists. They will decide they want to support the state of Israel. I may argue with them. They have the right to make that choice. But it is not an inherent part of being Jewish. AM: You write: 'Hostility to Israel has become so pervasive in progressive circles that Zionist students sometimes feel like ideological pariahs.' How should the Palestinian rights movement interact with Zionist students, especially since the overwhelming weight of institutional opprobrium is directed at anti-Zionist students? PB: I wrestled with how to write that chapter a lot. I think some Jewish students arrive at college from an environment in which Zionism and support for the state of Israel is normative. It's what they have experienced, what they have learned. They've probably had almost no interaction with Palestinians – no understanding of what Zionism looks like from the standpoint of its victims. So then the question is: how do you engage with those students? I think there is a great opportunity for education. Engaging with those students, talking to them, trying to create environments where they hear Palestinians and they hear scholarly work on Israel/Palestine is a better path than the path of exclusion. I don't think the path of exclusion – basically saying you're the equivalent of a white supremacist, we will not talk to you – is antisemitism. But I don't think it is the most effective way of bringing about the change that we want. I think I can understand that it's not easy for a Palestinian to sit down with a Jewish student and explain to the Jewish student why they are fully human and why they're fully deserving of equality. In the same way that I think Black Americans often don't really appreciate having to do that with white Americans. I understand that not everyone is going to want to play that role, but at the very least I don't think people should shut down those spaces. It's a strategic argument. I don't think that exclusion is the best way to bring about the change that we want. AM: Since we first spoke, a tenuous ceasefire has come into effect. How do you interpret its terms and how it came about? PB: To me the ceasefire shows that US pressure works. I'm glad that some hostages will be released and that Palestinians in Gaza will get some reprieve from the bombing and some additional aid. But even though Israel destroyed Gaza, Hamas will remain there, because the Palestinian problem is a political problem, not a military one. Israel never had a strategy, and will likely go back to destroying Gaza. AM: In your book, you end on a hopeful note, writing that Jews can contribute to humanity by 'liberating ourselves from supremacy so, as partners with Palestinians, we can help liberate the world'. Do you really draw hope at this time? PB: I don't think that hope is something one draws from material circumstances. Optimism is something you look for evidence for. I have none of that. I see Israel moving towards an American-style solution to the Palestinian question. In the 19th century, the American solution to the native population was to destroy their societies so that they couldn't function as a political entity. But hope comes from wherever it comes from. It's just something that human beings need. Like we need oxygen. For me, maybe it comes from belief in God. I don't know. I have glimpsed, myself, little episodes of this potential liberation as a child of South Africans. Imagine if this story of Palestine and Israel, which is now a story of unbelievable horror, of genocide, of apartheid – if it were instead a story of collective liberation. I do really believe in my soul that Israeli Jews and Palestinians could live together in full equality with a true process of reconciliation and full refugee return and historical justice that would unleash things that would be miraculous for people around the world. Will I see it? I have no idea. But that's the dream. Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is a plaintiff in a lawsuit that charges the US state department with circumventing the law to fund Israeli military units accused of human rights abuses Peter Beinart is editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning is out on 28 January
