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.

“Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader who had supported Oslo but was arrested during the second intifada for helping to plan attacks that killed Israeli civilians, told an Israeli journalist that he had ‘reached a simple conclusion. You don’t want to end the occupation and you don’t want to stop the settlements, so the only way to convince you is by force’.”

However, he says Israel’s long-term response - using military firepower to suppress Palestinian violence - will be self-defeating. Despite the huge number of deaths in Gaza, Beinart argues, whatever the composition of militant and civilian, Hamas has not been eliminated, and has clearly regrouped in significant numbers. Those fighters who die will be replaced by others, whether in the name of Hamas or other resistance movements. The end result will be more violence, more deaths on both sides – with no lasting security for Israelis.

It's hard to argue with his logic. The IDF has launched an intense ground assault into Gaza, in parallel with a two-month aid blockade to squeeze Hamas into releasing more hostages, a policy that NGOs claim has pushed Gaza towards famine, and has shocked all but Israel’s most hard-bitten supporters. Netanyahu’s fixation on destruction has become increasingly difficult to defend, both morally and strategically. In doing so, he has, perhaps deliberately, pushed “the day after” the war into oblivion.

Yet that question remains top of mind for people who care. What is the path forward, and the longer-term vision? How will people live? While the prospect of two states for two peoples is slipping away fast, the level of animosity makes the thought of them living together seem absurdly utopian.

Nevertheless, Beinart asks us to look beyond today’s distrust, arguing that ultimately, this outcome would liberate Jews as well as Palestinians. “We can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world… We can lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world.”

While the idea of a new Jewish identity that transcends victimhood is appealing, it glosses over a core of ugly realities that make his argument feel wilfully one-eyed.

In particular, Beinart’s lens on Gaza is focussed on Israel’s responsibility for the war, and Palestinian suffering, while largely ignoring the role and responsibility of Hamas in this catastrophe. Having argued that Israel cannot get rid of Hamas, he does not even engage with the question of what Israel could or should have done instead.

Granted, it is a difficult question to answer, morally as well as a militarily, given the massive number of Palestinian deaths and scale of destruction, and how to assess what would have been an appropriately “proportional” response, if that is possible.

But he has not even grappled with the fundamental principle: how would he have had Israel respond, if not to destroy Hamas but to neuter it, to protect Israeli citizens from future attacks and to secure the release of the 200-plus hostages taken on October 7?

Unlike Beinart, who simply opposes Israel’s political system, Hamas opposes the Israeli state and seeks its elimination, and appears to value that goal more than it does the welfare of the Palestinian people it purports to represent. The mastermind of October 7, Yahya Sinwar, wrote to colleagues that “civilian bloodshed in Gaza is a necessary sacrifice that will lead to the liberation of Palestine” and “he believed that the growing civilian death toll would serve to benefit Hamas more than a cessation of fighting would,” the Times of Israel reported.

How do we reconcile this admission with Beinart’s argument that Israeli Jews and all Jews will be liberated by giving Palestinians equal rights within a shared political arrangement? He also seems unconcerned that Hamas, the barbaric custodian of “Palestinian liberation” (whatever that means), has a stated aim of seeking the end of the Israeli state.

There is a conundrum here that cannot be avoided: if you give Palestinians equality with Israelis but a significant portion of them are committed to the destruction of the Israeli state, how will this free Jews from the burden of victimhood, and liberate them?

Beinart seems almost dismissive of the question. “As grave as Hamas’s crimes have been, Israel doesn’t have a Hamas problem. It has a Palestinian problem. Its problem is that Israeli security and Palestinian security are interconnected,” he writes. “Which means that it’s foolish to think that Israel grows safer when it reduces Gaza to rubble. Because if people in Gaza aren’t safe, they will sooner or later ensure that Israelis aren’t either.”

One of the central challenges for Jews, including those on the Left, after October 7 and the war in Gaza, is how to disentangle their support for Palestinian statehood with the involvement of Hamas in the alleged pursuit of that cause.

Beinart makes an impassioned case for the moral and security necessity of a shared Israeli-Palestinian existence, not separated by a hard border. But he dodges the confronting question that he raises with the title of his book: how should Jews, and the world, in pursuit of a just and lasting peace, overcome the obstacle of Hamas’s illegitimate but undeniable mantle as standard-bearer of the Palestinian cause.