Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza

Peter Beinart is a complicated figure in the Orthodox Jewish community, whose name seems to trigger all who hear it. One usually moderate rabbi whom I look up to said offhand that the birkat haminim recited in our daily liturgy refers to people like him. Another usually liberal Israeli friend asked me why I would even think about platforming a sonei Yisrael like him through this review. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever seen more vitriol on my social media than that which is directed towards Beinart. On the other hand, he was recently welcomed on the popular Judaism Unbound podcast and his views seem to be gaining traction amongst Liberal American Jews. Beinart’s most recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025), now joins several which have been written recently that argue either explicitly or implicitly against the existence of the State of Israel as it currently stands.

Not being the kind of person to take other people’s words on a book or its author, I wanted to read his position for myself before forming my opinion. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, at its core, is Beinart’s plea to otherwise liberal Zionists who may yet come around to his way of thinking. He opens the book with a letter to a “former friend” who has come to see Beinart as beyond the pale of Jewish discourse. Beinart acknowledges that such people see his writings as “a betrayal of our people” and, with commendable self-awareness, likens himself to Elisha Ben Abuya (while describing those who are willing to still engage with his words as Rabbi Meir). He admits that his hope is “to lure you beyond established boundaries” but also that “wherever we part, I hope the rupture is not final, that our journey together is not done.” Within that opening letter, Beinart lays out what I believe is his central argument to Zionist readers:

I consider your single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral and self-defeating. It justifies actions that I consider war crimes. It blinds you to the essential interconnectedness of Jewish and Palestinian safety. 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. That’s why I titled this book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, not Being Jewish After October 7. It’s not because I minimize that day. Like you, I remain shaken by its horror. I chose the former as a title because I know you grapple with the terror of that day. I worry that you don’t grapple sufficiently with the terror of the days that followed, and preceded it, as well.

Beinart thus sees his project as an educational one. His primary job is to provide context to readers that he believes missing in order to correct misunderstandings about the very nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In his words,

This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams. It’s about the story that enables our leaders, our families, and our friends to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip — the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing t death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name — and shrug, if not applaud. It’s about the story that convinces even Jews who are genuinely pained by Gaza’s agony that there is no other way to be safe. It’s our version of a story told in many places who decide that protecting themselves requires subjugating others, that equality is tantamount to death.

Beinart sees it as his jobs to pull the rug from under the feet of American Jews, showing them, once and for all, that the Jewish people “are not history’s permanent virtuous victims” and that we are “not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it.” Engaging in such a narrative of false innocence, Beinart argues, only “camouflages dominion as self-defense… exempts Jews from external judgment… [and] offers infinite license to fallible human beings.” Thus Beinart’s opening chapter is dedicated to analyzing the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the founding of the State until modern times. Prominent historians cited in his presentation include Benny Morris and Rashid Khalidi, whose books on the subject are readily available and have caused their own controversies. Beinart then devotes much of the book to responding to common Zionist talking points. For example,

I’m often told that if Palestinians weren’t so murderous, rejectionist, incompetent, and pigheaded, they’d have their own country by now. And it’s true that Palestinian leaders have not only made mistakes but also committed crimes. Hamas’ suicide bombings, which helped elect Netanyahu, were a strategic and moral disaster. So was the second intifada. Mahmoud Abbas is a corrupt authoritarian who dabbles in revisionist theories of the Holocaust.

But here’s the problem with our community’s tendency to blame Palestinians for their own oppression. Even when Palestinians do the very things Jews ask of them — when they recognize Israel, help the Israeli military keep Israelis safe, and protest nonviolently — Jewish institutions still act the same way. Israel didn’t stop bulldozing Palestinian homes when the PLO recognized its existence. AIPAC didn’t demand a settlement freeze when Fayyad became prime minister. The ADL didn’t start condemning the imprisonment of Palestinian children when Palestinians employed nonviolence. We demand that Palestinians produce Ghandis, and when they do, American Jewish organizations work to criminalize their boycotts and Israeli soldiers shoot them in the knees. No matter what strategy Palestinians employ in their fight for freedom, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies work to ensure it fails.

Beinart, however, does not stop there. Hammering in his point with the rhetorical skill of a talented journalist, he ends the chapter on the following note:

Muhammad Shehada tells the story of his best friend, Ali, whom he calls “the most thoughtful, most intelligent, most honest, most cultured, and sophisticated person I know.”

The two young men debated everything from Ukraine to Jordan Peterson to Jimmy Fallon. Ali held particularly strong opinions about Hamas. He “resented them with every bone in his body for years; he literally couldn’t stand them and always criticized everything they did, including their armed actions.” He was appalled by the massacre on October 7.

But the war Israel launched in response forced Ali’s family to relocate three times within Gaza City. He described having to walk through miles of rubble-filled streets to flee from one heavily bombed neighborhood to another while occasionally hearing screams for help from under bombed homes — noises that got loudest at night.

Eventually, Ali and his family walked south across the Strip, past decomposing bodies, to the city of Deir al-Balah, where they rented a small room for an exorbitant price. Ali spent several hours every day, while bombs fell, searching for food or water. “If there’s an afterlife and a judgment day,” he old Muhammed, “the only punishment I’ll ask from God for the Israelis would be to force them to go out, struggle to find water, and then carry those water gallons for a dozen kilometers every day under air strikes.”

In January, Ali was killed by an Israeli missile while walking next to Deir al-Balah’s Al Aqsa hospital.

Before he died, he told Muhammed that he had changed his mind about killing Israels. In order to deter Israel, he now supported armed attacks.

In beautifully telling that story, as tragic as it is unverifiable, Beinart succeeds in justifying for at least some of his readers events such as October 7th. In the next chapters, he goes on to defend many of the phrases that North American Jews find most threatening to hear on the streets:

What makes the ADL’s antipathy to the phrase “river to the sea” so ironic is that there already is a country that extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. Israeli leaders use similar expressions, all the time, to describe the territory they rule… And while the ADL can speculate about how a Palestinian state from the river to the sea would treat Jews, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians isn’t hypothetical. Israel was created by displacing roughly 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, when it extended its borders from the river to the sea. Most of the Palestinians under Israeli control lack citizenship, and none enjoy legal equality. Israel now stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, a charge endorsed by some of the most prominent human rights lawyers in the world.

Between the river and the sea, in other words, Israel has already perpetrated, or is perpetrating, the very abuses that the ADL and the Israeli Foreign Ministry accuse Palestinian activists of wanting to perpetrate. It’s a remarkable act of projection. But it serves a purpose. Labeling the slogan antisemitic — even genocidally antisemitic — turns public attention away from how Israel is treating Palestinians now, especially in Gaza, and redirects attention toward how Palestinians might treat Jews were they in charge. It replaces the actual subjugation that Palestinians experience as an oppressed people with the theoretical subjugation that Jews might experience were the shoe on the other foot.

Beinart uses similar logic to justify slogans like “when people are occupied, resistance is justified,” and usage of the phrase “intifada.” Furthermore, he argues,

if it’s wrong to endorse violence against Israeli civilians, then endorsing violence against Palestinian civilians is wrong too. Given what Israel has done to Gaza, pro-Israel slogans like “Israel has a right to defend itself” and “I stand with the IDF” are at least as ominous as “intifada” or “resistance is justified.” Yet Jewish leaders have no problem with those. Some Jews say the acid test of whether a chant like “river to the sea” or “intifada” is threatening is whether most Jews think it is. But if that’s the standard, then why shouldn’t Palestinians determine whether pro-Israel slogans threaten them?

From where do all these double standards stem? Beinart has an idea:

I sometimes imagine asking the people who speak for our community a series of questions: How many Palestinians would Israel have to kill in Gaza before you urged the United States to stop sending it weapons? How many Palestinian prisoners would Israel have to torture and sexually abuse with impunity before you acknowledged the right of international courts to put Israeli leaders on trial? How long must West Bank Palestinians live under military law before you stop calling Israel a democracy? How many human rights groups have to accuse it of apartheid before you question the principle that Jews alone must rule? I’ve had enough conversations like these to predict the responses. They’d likely include references to Hamas, human shields, Iran, and antisemitism, coupled with expressions of regret that the cruel realities of the Middle East require Israel to protect itself in such painful ways. But the essential answer would be clear: There is no limit. No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite.

Here, perhaps predictably, is where Beinart launches into direct comparison between Israel and Apartheid South Africa. In unpacking this, and pushing for rectification, he acknowledges that Israel (and world Jewry) has much to lose. After all,

For generations, Jews in Israel and the diaspora have built our identity around this story of collective victimhood and moral infallibility. For many of us, questioning Jewish statehood means questioning Jewishness. What would being Israeli even mean in a state that didn’t favor Jews, given that Jewish favoritism is built into the name “Israel” itself, which is a synonym for the Jewish people? And what would replacing Jewish supremacy with legal equality mean for American Jews when most American synagogues feature an Israeli flag on the bima and a prayer for Israel in the liturgy? Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it’s not clear what is left.

Nevertheless, Beinart writes, if the South Africans could do it then so can the Israelis:

When Jews imagine a state that grants Palestinians equality between the river and the sea, many envisage the supposed barbarism and dysfunction of the Middle East descending upon pristine Tel Aviv. White South Africans, who took an equally dim view of their surroundings, nurtured similar fears. They discussed Nigeria and Congo with as much dread as Jews today discuss Syria and Iraq. In this part of the world, they muttered, violence is endemic, and defenseless minorities don’t survive…

These days, when people tell me Jews and Palestinians can’t live alongside each other equally because such things aren’t possible in the Middle East, my mind flashes back four decades. I remember relatives citing rhe dictatorships and civil wars north of the Limpopo River as evidence that Blacks and whites couldn’t live together in a democratic South Africa. The one group of South Africans I never heard say this were Blacks, just as I rarely hear it from Palestinians today.

Of course, Beinart acknowledges that a hypothetical unitary state from the river to the sea will likely be unable to retain the name “Israel,” but does not view that as a major loss. the name Israel, he emphasizes, represents unacceptable Jewish supremacy. The country’s name, Beinart wrote earlier in the book, “might become Israel-Palestine” or “Palestine-Israel” or perhaps something else that does not connote group supremacy” and that perfect makes sense because such a state would be unrecognizable from the Israel that we know today anyway.

As mentioned at the beginning of this review, many have recently written books like this. Shaul Magid’s Necessity of Exile comes to mind as the most immediate parallel, but at least half a dozen such works have been written over the past year alone. What separates Beinart from many of these is that he writes as a practicing Orthodox Jew (or at least a member in relatively good standing of an Orthodox community) and addresses the topic using the talking-points people will actually encounter in day-to-day interactions rather than theological treatises. Yes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz is invoked more than once, but Beinart’s main arguments reflect those that Zionist college students will actually encounter if/when they engage with their anti-Zionist peers with the same fallacies included (I don’t know many who consider “Jewish Voice for Peace” to be a legitimately Jewish organization, but Beinart certainly does).

Beinart also, to his credit, at least attempts to draw a distinction between Anti-Zionism and antisemitism. He does so, however, by partially blaming the Jewish community for the conflations that happen so frequently. “We must demand that Israel’s detractors clearly distinguish between a foreign country and their fellow Jewish citizens,” he writes, “but we must also make that distinction ourselves. And for the most part, Jewish leaders don’t.” In depicting support for Israel “not as a political choice but as an inherent part of being a Jew” we invite more, not less, conflation of Anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Spraying Anti-Zionist graffiti on the walls of an Israeli embassy and a synagogue may well be equally fair because, in Beinart’s words, “they are both, in their essence, Zionist institutions.” Beinart even suggests that “the whole point of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is to depict Palestinians and their supporters as bigots, thus turning a conversation about the oppression of Palestinians into a conversation about the oppression of Jews.” Even when legitimate antisemitism on campus is cited, Beinart minimizes it in the grand scheme of things:

There have indeed been attacks on Jews on U.S. campuses. A May 2024 study by Hillel International found that 17 percent of Jewish students said they had been verbally harassed as a result of pro-Palestinian protests and 7 percent said they had been physically assaulted. At Cornell, a student threatened to stab and rape his Jewish classmates. At the University of Georgia, a Jewish student was attacked by someone who said, “You Israeli, I am going to murder you and all your family.” While being asked if they were Jewish, two Ohio State students were assaulted outside a bar… But Netanyahu’s depiction of American universities is still absurd. It’s absurd because although Israel has become deeply unpopular among the progressive students whom he deems an antisemitic mob, the data is clear: the vast majority of campus progressives distinguish between Jews and Israel.

… Hostility to Israel has become so pervasive in progressive circles that Zionist students sometimes feel like ideological pariahs. This hostility doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s hard to ask Palestinians to care about the feelings of pro-Israel students while Israel slaughters and starves their families.

Beinart acknowledges that “treating Zionist students as pariahs is both unfair and counterproductive” but also encourages those students to “distinguish between being made uncomfortable and being made unsafe” despite having himself cited examples of genuinely unsafe situations.

And here we have my largest issue with Beinart’s project. He identifies strongly with the Jewish community, is clearly familiar with Jewish texts and traditions, and he writes with all the confidence of any communal insider. However, he has also so completely accepted the narratives he presents that he appears no longer capable of understanding the alternative perspective as anything other than a strawman. He does not consider the possibilities that Zionism may genuinely be part of Judaism for many (most?) contemporary Jews, that mistaking anti-Zionism for antisemitism might come from an honest place, and he minimizes the experiences of those who have faced genuine antisemitism at the hands of those who were supposedly just “Anti-Zionist.”

Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza, therefore, may convince some but will have a hard time persuading the majority of those who pick it up simply because they will not find Beinart to be sympathetic to their perspectives. Beinart’s well-meaning tone will no-doubt come across as patronizing to the very people he wants to convince.

Nonetheless, Beinart’s book represents a real trend within the Jewish community. One we cannot ignore simply by questioning the Jewish credentials of those who hold positions like his. If we are to survive as a global Jewish community, we MUST learn how to listen to each other, share a Shabbat table with one another, and engage in genuine and respectful conversation. Whether you pick up Beinart’s book or not, I hope you are prepared to talk to those you meet who share his views. And I hope they are prepared to talk to you.