It would be irresponsible to attempt a faithful reflection on Peter Beinart’s “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” without recognizing at least two challenges.
First and most important, I am not Jewish. Because of this, engaging with any work that begins with “Being Jewish…” requires acknowledging that I am an outsider, eavesdropping on a “family conversation” with nuances that I cannot fully appreciate.
As a Christian, this dilemma is mitigated by a shared Abrahamic faith tradition and, as a U.S. citizen, by a shared concern (and complicity) with the destruction of Gaza. However, my outsider status is still a dilemma that must be cloaked in as much humility as possible.
Second, engaging in any conversation regarding Israel and Judaism should always involve a mindfulness of the most persistent form of hate in human history: Antisemitism. In his chapter “The New New Antisemitism,” Beinart quoted British scholar David Feldman, who views antisemitism as “an ancient ‘reservoir’ of hostile ideas about Jews that have ‘built up over centuries, even millennia.”
“Because Jews,” Beinart writes, “have for so long been depicted as cunning, malevolent and all-powerful, anti-Jewish motifs offer a cultural depository, which people draw from–sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately–when trying to explain phenomena that engage or bewilder them.”
Beinart is clear, however, that the historical reality of antisemitism shouldn’t shield Israel and Zionism from critique. He writes, “It’s crucial to distinguish condemnations of Israel and Zionism that deploy antisemitic concepts from the condemnation of Israel and Zionism itself, which is no more bigoted than opposing any other state or political ideology.”
Beinart’s short, five-chapter denunciation of Zionism flows from two of his orienting identities. The first is his Jewishness.
Beinart keeps kosher and is part of an Orthodox synagogue. In the prologue, he writes that he considers himself a “Jewish loyalist,” albeit one that is “cursed on the street by people who believe Jewish loyalty requires my excommunication.”
In his opening chapter, Beinart paints a biblical picture illustrating the template many Jews use to evade moral responsibility. He writes about the Jewish festival of Purim and its roots in the story of Esther.
During Purim, many Jews celebrate how Esther saved her people from extermination at the hands of Haman. But the Book of Esther didn’t end with Haman’s death. It ended with the Jews wreaking havoc against their enemies, which is the root of the Purim celebration.
“Purim isn’t only about the danger gentiles pose to us,” Beinart writes. “It’s also about the danger we pose to them.”
In a later chapter, he writes that the Jewish tradition “doesn’t only speak about God liberating us from being slaves. It speaks about God liberating us from being masters.”
Evading and obscuring details that don’t fit into the story they tell about themselves are not acts that are exclusive to Jews, which Beinart describes in later chapters. But this practice carries heavier consequences when coupled with political systems that use safety to justify the oppression of its neighbors.
Here, one of Beinart’s other identities provides a helpful analogy to the Palestinian conflict. He spent much of his childhood visiting South Africa, where his parents immigrated to the U.S. from.
He remembers attending Shabbat meals in Cape Town and slowly becoming aware of the Black South Africans who were doing the menial labor all around him. The story Beinart absorbed about these people was that they were legally subordinate out of necessity.
Otherwise, he was told, they would threaten white people’s existence. The “story I heard constantly in my youth,” he wrote, was that “safety required supremacy.” That myth largely disappeared for Beinart when apartheid was upended.
“It’s now an embarrassment,” he writes. “Barely anyone tells that story about South Africa anymore.” He adds, “Yet every day, Jews tell it about Israel.”
Beinart weaves the example of South Africa in his description of all the ways the Israeli state has tormented Palestinians in the name of safety. He also, both subtly and explicitly, offers the South African example as the only way toward lasting peace, if only Israel would act in good faith to extend the rights of self-determination to the Palestinian people.
He describes many of the ways Israel has refused to do this and the excuses it employs for not doing so. Among those is how Palestinians have constantly been placed in “lose-lose” situations.
Violence results in the Israeli state clamping down harder on Palestinian necks. But non-violence hasn’t worked either.
In the spring of 2018, Palestinians in Gaza, apart from any Hamas influence, marched unarmed to the border to protest the conditions in the open-air prison they have been confined to. They carried the Palestinian, not the Hamas flag.
Once Hamas saw this nonviolent protest movement gaining traction, they temporarily halted rocket fire into Israel. The result? Israeli soldiers shot at the protesters, killing around 200 and permanently injuring over 1,000 more.
Alongside other stories, such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization cooperating with Israel in the West Bank, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, Beinart sees the desperation created by the Israeli state and its American supporters.
He writes: “[H]ere’s the problem with our community’s tendency to blame Palestinians for their own oppression. Even when Palestinians do the very things Jews ask of them–when they recognize Israel, help the Israeli military keep Israelis safe, and protest nonviolently–Jewish institutions still act the same way…We demand that Palestinians produce Gandhis, and when they do, American Jewish organizations work to criminalize their boycotts and Israeli soldiers shoot them in the knees.”
Detractors on all sides will find reasons to be angry at “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”
Though Beinart goes to great lengths describing how oppression explains but doesn’t justify violence, he will be accused of shilling for Hamas. And while he details extensively how American Jewish institutions have enabled the oppression of the Palestinian people, anarchists will be disappointed at his implicit trust in an institutional solution to an institutional problem.
Regardless, Beinart offers an excellent, clear-eyed portrait of how, when humans are given power, we often use religious justification and historical oppression to shield us from ethical responsibility.
Specifically, it is a helpful resource for Americans who have only heard one side of the story, which, in more ways than we realize, was caused by us. This story will continue to haunt us in harmful ways if we don’t make seismic changes in our policy toward Palestine.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
