Beinart’s utopian vision ignores awkward truths

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza (Atlantic Books)
Peter Beinart

The American journalist Peter Beinart is the English world’s pre-eminent critic of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people. In recent years his commentary has argued that Jewish Israelis enjoy a legal supremacy that has made the country’s political system and society immoral, and its future unsustainable.

His latest book, with its provocative title Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, intensifies this critique by focussing on both “Jewish traditions” (God not only liberating Jews from being slaves but from being masters) as well as political arguments in advocating  a new version of Israel in the wake of the war in Gaza, in which Jews and Palestinians live side by side with equal rights to self-determination under the law, in a confederation, binational state or something similar.

Beinart writes that he chose the title as a response to an unnamed former friend: “When I hear you thunder about the Israelis murdered and captured on October 7, I wish you would summon some of that righteous anger for the Palestinians slaughtered in even greater numbers.”

He advances many persuasive ideas in his effort to make Jews show not only compassion for the Palestinians killed by the IDF’s response to October 7, but to make them realise that Palestinian violence against Israel will continue until they are granted equality under the law.

In espousing this vision, Beinart charts the history of Palestinian dispossession and says their disillusion with the Camp David negotiations in 2000 laid the foundations for their resort to violence. “Palestinians no longer believed that Oslo would bring them freedom,” he writes.