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The lonely position of Peter Beinart

Or is it? For all his hard truths, the US commentator can’t avoid joining others in giving Israel-Palestine more significance than it warrants
January 29, 2025

Peter Beinart begins his slim volume with a “Note to My Former Friend”. He accuses this anonymous friend of having embraced “fanaticism” and asserts that his “single-minded focus on Israeli security [is] immoral and self-defeating”. Beinart tells him that “when I enter a synagogue, I am no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away”. Elsewhere in Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, he asks: “How does someone like me, who still considers himself a Jewish loyalist, end up being cursed on the street by people who believe Jewish loyalty requires my excommunication?” 

So it is that, when diaspora Jews write about their relationship with the “over there” of Israel, they often end up talking about their relationship with the Jewish community “over here”. Beinart certainly has good reason to mention the personal costs of his stance on Israel. A former editor of the New Republic who once possessed impeccable liberal Zionist credentials, his journey since the 2012 publication of The Crisis of Zionism, through to 7th October 2023 and beyond, has led him to the belief that a single state with full equality between Palestinians and Israelis is the only way forward. Despite his continuing orthodox Jewish practice and his deep commitment to Jewish life, this—highly public—journey has put him beyond the Jewish communal pale in the US.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is an appeal to his fellow Jews (I am one too) to abandon those stories they tell themselves “to block out the screams”; to face the fact that Jews are both victims but also perpetrators of inconceivable suffering. While this might seem to be a book with limited interest to those who are not Jewish (and some of the references in the book to Jewish practices and texts do assume a modest level of knowledge), it is also useful to anyone who seeks to understand how and why Israel-Palestine has, by common acclaim, become The Most Important Issue in the World.

Beinart’s charge sheet against Israel and the Jewish diaspora is a lengthy one, and it ranges further than the state’s actions since the Hamas attacks of 7th October 2023 up to this January’s ceasefire. He argues that Jews are forcing Palestinians to fit an age-old story, as the latest of an unbroken sequence of Jew-haters trying to destroy the Jewish people. The “crimes” visited on Palestinians—Beinart accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and massacres—are either ignored by most Jews or seen as necessary when faced with an implacably savage enemy. Beinart also indicts whole swathes of the Jewish community in the US for not only colluding with Israel’s crimes, but also joining forces with the racist right to suppress legitimate Palestinian protest by making spurious accusations of antisemitism. In short, Jews are giving up their proud history of involvement in progressive, universal causes for the sake of narrow “tribalism”.

Beinart does not attempt to defend or mitigate the scale of the atrocities that Hamas committed on 7th October, nor does he have any illusions about the chauvinist aims of the organisation itself. But when it comes down to it, he sees Palestinian extremism and violence against unarmed Israeli citizens as pathological, yet comprehensible, responses to oppression. With the two-state solution now effectively impossible, the only viable way forward, he argues, is complete equality between Israelis and Palestinians—within a single state. To those who point to the threat of Palestinian extremism within that state, he counters that dire predictions about a post-apartheid bloodbath in South Africa, to give one example, came to nothing. A just solution will, Beinart believes, drastically reduce the temperature of Palestinian anger.

The only viable way forward, Beinart argues, is a single state

Much of Beinart’s argument is taboo in mainstream diasporic Jewish spaces. Yet what his many Jewish critics are unlikely to acknowledge is that his narrative does not fit easily into Palestinian solidarity discourse either. Strikingly, he does not use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza (although some he cites with approval certainly do). Acceptance of this word has become a deal-breaker in pro-Palestinian activist circles. Further, in some respects he “normalises” Israel, in that he empathises with the original desire to build a Jewish state and does not see it, as those activists might, as a uniquely evil historical aberration. His comparisons with South Africa (as well with as other territories, such as Northern Ireland) are intended not to pathologise Israel—but to show that it isn’t so exceptional that it is beyond solution.

In this way, Beinart constructs a position that is likely to leave him even more alone. While many of his criticisms of Israel’s actions in the war are quietly or loudly shared even by some liberal or left Zionists, his embrace of a one-state future is, for now, crossing a line for all but anti-Zionist Jews; such a future is widely assumed to be one with no “law of return” allowing diaspora Jews a refuge in an often-hostile world. What’s more, Beinart’s sceptical attitude towards accusations of antisemitism will not help him connect with those Jews who are scared right now.

But I also doubt he will find it easy to find acceptance in pro-Palestinian circles, including among Jewish anti-Zionists. Beinart ultimately remains a liberal by inclination, and the radical diasporism of Jewish anti-Zionist circles—with all its talk of solidarity with the oppressed against the forces of settler-colonialism—is far from his natural home. 

Yet, in the end, Beinart can’t quite embrace pariahdom either. The latter part of the book shifts towards a discourse that Jews across the spectrum will find familiar in form, if not in content. He speaks of “liberation” from the weight of oppressing Palestinians. He speaks of a “transformation” by which Jews will embrace the best qualities of their tradition. Then he speaks of the world-historical importance of this transformation:

Maybe this sounds grandiose, but I don’t think our transformation as Jews is necessary only for Israel and Palestine. It’s necessary for the world. Almost two generations ago, humanity witnessed a new birth of freedom. Mandela walked out of prison, Russia held its first free election, young Germans danced atop the Berlin Wall.... The spirit of that era has long since died.... From Putin to Modi to Xi to Trump, thugs dominate the globe, inciting tribal violence while they steal their nations blind. In its unchecked cruelty and unbearable pain, the destruction of Gaza is a symbol of our age.

That does indeed sound grandiose. And he goes further:

Speaking of Abraham’s descendants in the book of Genesis, God says, “All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.” Perhaps this is what it means for the Jewish people to bless humanity in our time. It means liberating ourselves from supremacy so, as partners with Palestinians, we can help liberate the world.

Such quasi-millenarian thinking is common among Jews across the political spectrum, religious or not, pro-Israel or not. This language of world-historical significance is endemic even more broadly. We Jews have been treated as significant so widely and for so long (often negatively, sometimes positively)—and we ourselves have traditions that exult in our spiritual, political and historical significance—that the language of mattering so much is easy for us to adopt. 

And it isn’t just Jews. One of the defining characteristics of Palestinian solidarity activism today is an insistence on the foundational significance for the world of what is happening in Palestine. When Greta Thunberg chose Palestine as an issue that is equally important as climate change, she too was expressing a belief that the “transformation” of Israel-Palestine is “necessary for the world”. There is no shortage of people who are neither Jewish nor Palestinian, and yet put all their hopes in Israelis, Jews or Palestinians.

Beinart’s book ends up over-inflating the importance of Israel-Palestine

It’s a terrible shame that Beinart’s book ends up validating this over-inflated sense of the importance of Israel-Palestine. After all, while his detractors won’t see it this way, the greatest strength of his approach lies in pursuing the awkward nuances of liberalism to the point where most liberals would run for cover. And make no mistake, even the most flaccid kind of liberal needs to recognise that Israel’s war in Gaza is being prosecuted by a government that has absolutely nothing liberal about it. But by raising the stakes so that the fate of the world depends on what happens in Israel-Palestine, Beinart makes it less likely that this liberal confrontation with reality will happen. 

In the most moving section of the book, Beinart confesses to his former friend:

When I see you wearing dog tags to remind yourself, every hour of every day, of the hostages in Gaza, I know that if I were among those hostages, you would fight obsessively for my release. You would do so precisely because of the tribalism I fear. And in my nightmares, I imagine myself—abandoned by all the enlightened universalists—knocking anxiously at your door.

This is an extraordinary expression of ambivalence, the kind of nuance that enrages many, but is liberalism’s greatest contribution to intellectual life. Beinart yearns for the comforts of insular “tribalism”, but he cannot reconcile himself to the costs that Palestinians will pay for it. Instead, he seeks a different kind of comfort: by positioning Israel-Palestine as the fulcrum of the world, Beinart can convince himself and others that the costs of being loathed by many are worth it. 

The truly lonely position would have been to insist on the seriousness of Israel-Palestine, to not look away when terrible crimes are perpetrated, while also not granting it foundational importance. Beinart offers glimpses of what this position might look like, but, ultimately, he is compelled to go beyond saying that this issue is less unusual and more solvable than we might think. There has to be more than that, otherwise Israel-Palestine would just be like Western Sahara or Cyprus or Sri Lanka; one issue among many, of local interest only. And where would Peter Beinart be then?