Beinart and Szeps have surrendered to despair. We mustn’t.

A packed room greeted Peter Beinart in Melbourne recently as he discussed his latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. Beinart called out the devastating hunger of civilians in Gaza, the callousness of some members of Knesset, and the tragic failures of the IDF.

We hear the pain he articulates. Each death in Gaza and in Israel, is a devastating human tragedy that no political analysis should obscure.

But his conclusion that therefore we must abandon Israel as a Jewish state is flawed.

Josh Szeps,  writing in The Age made a similar argument last week in an article titled “My grandmother fled the Holocaust. Now it’s time for Jews to abandon Israel.”

The narrative arc for both Beinart and Szeps is familiar but illogical.

Beinart weaves in kippah references, quotes from Talmud, and nostalgia for Yavneh (the ancient city not the Melbourne school), in a persistent refrain: Don’t forget, I’m very Jewish.

Szeps draws on his family’s Holocaust trauma to ground his moral stance. (All four of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors but I won’t do the same. Frankly, wielding their suffering to justify my arguments feels a little uncouth.)

For progressive Jews, it’s easy to be swept up by Beinart and Szeps. Their language is persuasive, emotional, and full of code words that feel like home. We agree with many, maybe most, of their observations and heartache.

But they seem to think that they are the first Jews to worry about harming others, that you cannot be a Zionist without succumbing to the worse excesses of the state.

The claim that Jews shouldn’t have a nation-state because we can’t handle power is, in itself, an antisemitic trope. Other peoples have states, borders, governments – often terribly flawed. Imperfect countries scatter the world. Why are Jews uniquely disqualified to have our own country?

Progressive Zionists are unhappy with Israel’s failure to facilitate more humanitarian aid into Gaza but many of us are also unhappy with the campaign against Israel, which is not a safe place for people who identify as Zionist. That’s why many of us felt unable to sign recent letters protesting Israel’s actions.

Israel’s government deserves scrutiny. It should be better, a lot better. But collapsing a government into the question of a country’s right to exist is intellectually dishonest.

Beinart and Szeps can take flight with their own identity in part because there is an Israel – a country where half the world’s Jews live, argue, protest, and create.

Their arguments depend upon a Diaspora that is kind to Jewish continuity. They seem to have forgotten that Diaspora antisemitism was the reason for Israel’s creation and that Israel has been a refuge for Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Arab lands alike.

We have a diverse and thriving Jewish Diaspora culture in many countries, but we also have rampant assimilation, which is not kind to Jewish continuity.

Just as we have both the Babylonian and Yerushalmi Talmud, we need both Diaspora and Israel-centred Jewish life. This is the Zionism articulated by Ahad Ha’am who, unlike many other Zionists, recognised the need for both a Jewish homeland and a thriving Diaspora.

We need progressive Zionists to be confident and informed understanding Israel– to criticise policies, yes, but not to question the country’s existence every time we feel discomfort or grief.

Progressive Zionists need to be able to celebrate both Israel and Diaspora Judaism. Zionist literacy – history, complexity, language – are, and should continue to be, core curriculum in our schools and youth movements.

The issue isn’t educating non-Jews. It’s building clarity and courage within our own community: among Jews and those who marry in, among those who lean in, among those who care, and among all those who understand Jewish destiny as theirs.

We need to ensure Jewish people know what Zionism is, why it exists, and how to hold its nuances. That means being able to be critical of the Israeli government and exposed to others who are critical, without cynically and naively undoing the whole country. 

Beinart and Szeps want to give up on Zionism. That might feel emotionally compelling — we all see what they see — but it is historically narrow, intellectually selective, and politically unpragmatic.

Diaspora Jewish communities can do better than surrendering to despair. We can reach for a more nuanced, confident, hopeful, optimistic, generous, and literate approach to being Jewish in the modern world.