Published: 11 June 2025
Last updated: 11 June 2025
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.
- I’m Jewish (with biographical references or Hebrew terminology).
- I publicly condemn Israel.
- I’m moral – and if you don’t speak up, maybe you’re not.
- Jews no longer need a nation-state.
- Now I can sleep at night.
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.)
