Published: 20 May 2025
Last updated: 20 May 2025
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.
Comments9
Philip Taylor19 July at 12:57 pm
It’s worth considering that the 2 ruling parties are both extremist (Lukid and Hamas). It should be possible for a more moderate government to be elected in Israel(if it is indeed a democracy). The ANC was considered a violent terrorist organization before the end of apartheid. The central point of Beinharts book is that violence is the result of oppression. Justifying oppression and violence because of violence on the other side is circular and avoids taking responsibility for the violence and systematic oppression perpetrated by Israel.
The longer term question of how to maintain a peaceful society would require a constitution like the US that would prevent sectarian coalitions taking control of government and instituting rascist laws like the recent ‘basic law’ implemented in Israel that clearly prefers people based on ethnicity. The whole concept of a nation for a specific religion/ethnicity is incompatible with peace. Erasing Palestinian identity and history in that project is deeply wrong and a stain that won’t wash off.
Ian Light26 May at 04:13 am
A binational state is possible if the vast majority of people are Liberal Humanistic Democrats who have ultra effective conventional and thermonuclear weapons to defend themselves against Conquerors who glorify rape pillage and atrocious barbarism.
Gwen22 May at 08:21 pm
I found this article while looking into Beinart’s book. In effect, I think the conundrum you highlight, “If you give Palestinians equality with Israelis but a significant portion of them are committed to the destruction of the Israeli state…” actually gets at the heart of the work that we Jews must do to see this conflict with moral clarity. For example, I see no reason why the IDF, a significant portion of the Israeli population, should have the extent of free reign that it currently does to destroy Gaza. I think we need to move away from these wide sweeping contradictions and see Gazans not solely as extensions of Hamas, but as persons with their own agencies. (For what other countries do we so closely lump the individual citizen with the governing body?) Furthermore, I think it is dangerous to suggest that equality be withheld for fear of those who are being oppressed. I can think of no instance in history where in the longterm that type of militaristic tactic turned out to be a sound one, or a sustainable one. Israel undoubtedly faces immense threats (and ones that often feel existential given the countries that surround it). But I think we are far overdue to relieve ourselves of these fears for even just a moment to demand that Israel does not weaponize Judaism in the name of safety.