Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza—a Review

In his new book, Peter Beinart no longer supports the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, but proposes a single state solution that would balance equality for all citizens with a commitment to support the Palestinian and Jewish collectives within it.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart
Knopf 2025
ISBN 9780593803899

David Myers

In 2010, the journalist Peter Beinart wrote a bracing article called “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” a sort of “j’accuse” against an institutional world that had pushed the project of Zionism into a “downward spiral.” The unquestioned adherence of mainstream American Jewish organizations to the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been returned to power in 2009 after a prior tenure a decade earlier, was not only wrong-headed but self-defeating. “If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course,” Beinart warned, “they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled.”

In fact, a new generation of secular American Jews — and younger Americans in general — were growing increasingly detached from Israel and the Zionist project. Beinart’s article, which formed the basis of his book The Crisis of Zionism (2012), provided intellectual and moral sustenance to younger Jews — especially one group of rebels who took rise in 2014 under the banner “IfNotNow” (a phrase drawn from a famous passage of the ancient Jewish ethical treatise Pirke Avot). The catalyst to the group’s founding was Israel’s war in Gaza in 2014, which was more deadly and destructive by orders of magnitude than the previous ones in 2008-09 and 2012. In a bold move reflecting their mooring in Jewish tradition, members of IfNotNow stationed themselves in front of the headquarters of leading Jewish and Israeli organizations and read the Mourner’s Prayer (Kaddish) in memory of all the Jews and Palestinians killed in the 2014 war. 

Peter Beinart, who had had a meteoric career prior to this point, including serving as editor-in-chief of The New Republic by the age of 29, became the spiritual guide of this cohort of millennial Jews. His mission, as he described it then, was to salvage the project of liberal Zionism, which he called “the great American Jewish challenge of our day.” But over the past nearly decade and a half, he has moved away from his defense of liberal Zionism — and from its central goal of promoting the two-state solution. His new book proposes a different political solution, a single state that would balance equality for all citizens with a commitment to support the Palestinian and Jewish collectives within it. In this aim, Beinart excavates a distinctive group of Zionists from the 1920s and 1930s, largely German Jews associated with the early peace movement Brit Shalom, who eschewed the demand for a Jewish majority in a Jewish state in favor of binationalism. 

The primary task of Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning is not to advance this vision. Rather, it is an urgent appeal to his fellow Jews to move past the all-consuming blindness induced by the trauma of October 7. The book is a cri de coeur, an expression of Beinart’s deep pain and exasperation that Jews have failed to acknowledge the monumental devastation and suffering that Israel has wrought in Gaza — which he has publicly described as a genocide. He maintains that long-standing Zionists, along with those newly fortified in their Zionist convictions after 10/7, have plunged themselves into a deep moral and political abyss. They have so sanctified the State of Israel as the defender of Jewish interests as to insist that any action it undertakes is, by definition, virtuous. Beinart here follows in the path of the iconoclastic Israeli scientist and philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who gained renown as an early and fierce critic of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank beginning in 1967. Well before that, Leibowitz, an Orthodox Jew, condemned the way in which Israeli state actors tended to bestow a measure of holiness upon mundane political and military actions. The intermingling of religion and politics that he called out was not only dangerous — in that it could justify any step in the name of the virtuous state. It was, Leibowitz famously proclaimed, “idolatry.” 

Beinart draws extensively on Leibowitz in making the case against a mythologized view of the state of Israel as a paragon of virtue, when in fact it has become the source of idolatrous veneration. In the Manichean world that he describes, supporters of Israel see anything that the state does, including in Gaza in 2023-2024, as legitimate, and conversely, anything that Palestinians do in support of their quest for freedom as illegitimate and immoral. This includes not only different forms of armed resistance (for example, those that target civilians and those that do not) but also peaceful forms of protest (e.g., the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement). In the completely self-justifying worldview of pro-Israel advocacy, one can rationalize and justify every action that the state takes — up to and including gross violations of international humanitarian law — as morally valid and as a necessary response to the long history of persecution against Jews. Conversely, in such a world, one can easily occlude from vision the suffering and humanity of the other. In this regard, Beinart recalls an article from the New York Times from April 2024 that describes the death, serious injury, and property loss that befell members of the 2023 graduating class of the Al-Azhar dental school as a result of Israeli air strikes. He expressed deep regret that more Jews did not evince sympathy for these graduates who suffered during the war (and who were among hundreds of thousands of students who were deprived of an education from the time of the Israeli attacks after October7). Beinart pointed out that “the X accounts of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Israeli government, and the Israeli prime minister mentioned (Jewish) college students more than four hundred times between October 7, 2023, and June 4, 2024. Not once did they mention the suffering of students in the Gaza Strip.”

A key part of the author’s objective in Being Jewish is to reclaim a different Jewish tradition than one that enables indifference to such suffering. He arrives at his reclamation, in the first instance, via negation. Thus, he calls attention to what he finds problematic in revered Jewish texts from the past. In the spirit of Leibowitz, he points out the hubris of the biblical Korach, who challenged Moses by arguing that it was not just the great prophet who was holy, but rather “all of the community (of Israel) is holy” (Numbers 16:3). For Beinart, as with Leibowitz, the self-ascription of holiness provided cover to those committing destructive and immoral acts. One place where that impulse can be found is in the holiday of Purim, the carnivalesque celebration of Jews escaping the verdict of the delivered by Haman in ancient Persia. Although Jewish children love the frivolity of Purim, Beinart observes that what is all too often ignored is the act of vengeance-driven mass murder committed by Jews in the central text of Purim, the scroll of Esther. It was this act that served as a catalyst for Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli-American settler, to enter the Cave of the Patriarch in Hebron on Purim in 1994 and open fire, murdering 29 Muslim worshippers.  

In revisiting Jewish texts and rituals, Beinart is a serious-minded, observant Jew, but he is not a constructive theologian. So the book does not offer a robust reconstruction of a competing set of Jewish texts that sustains a philosophy of peace and love. Rather what it offers is a method for reclamation drawn from ancient Jewish practice. Beinart frames his ambition in the opening of the book by referring to the relationship between Elisha ben Abuya and his one-time teacher, Rabbi Meir — two first-century CE sages in Palestine. Elisha was known as “Acher,” the Other, because of his heretical enunciation of a life of ritual observance. One of the most well-known legends surrounding Elisha was that his teacher Rabbi Meir did not cut off contact with him and even continued to draw upon his rich knowledge of Torah. Beinart raises up the relationship between the heretical student and his revered rabbi as a model for how he and other iconoclasts should engage more conventional, pro-Israel members of the Jewish community with whom there is profound disagreement. “This book,” he states at the outset, “is for the Jews who are still sitting at that Shabbat table, and for the Jews — sometimes their own children — who have left in disgust. I yearn for us to sit together.” He then continues: “But not this way. Not as masters of the house.”

His desire to reshape the Jewish narrative on Israel — by acknowledging the devastating effects that the political project of Zionism has had on Palestinians — invites criticism from both sides of the ideological spectrum. On the left, Beinart is seen as an apologist unwilling to unmoor himself from the toxicity of Zionism, on which he still makes an unlikely claim as a single state binationalist drawing on the legacy of pre-state cultural Zionists such as Judah L. Magnes and Martin Buber. Moreover, his deep disappointment at those who lauded or were indifferent to the Hamas attacks on October 7, along with his sympathy with Jewish students who felt uncomfortable during last year’s campus protests, prompted critic Azad Essa to insist that the book was “no reckoning at all.” Rather, he writes, it “is really his attempt to provide Jews or Jewish Zionists an escape route from what they have perpetuated on Palestinians.”

While Essa and others excoriate him for a self-indulgent (and yet, in their eyes, insufficient) focus on Jewish shame, critics from the right blast Beinart for a host of sins, including his audacious attempt to reclaim Jewish tradition. The Israeli writer Assaf Sagiv argues that Being Jewish “serves up the familiar progressive concoction of sanctimonious preaching (labeled, as usual, as ‘Jewish humanism’), automatic identification with pre-designated victims, and a stubborn denial of facts.” He goes on to attack Beinart for what he deems sloppy and outrageous historical analogies — like that between October 7 and the violent uprising of Haitian slaves in which thousands of Europeans were raped and murdered as an act of liberatory violence that lead to independence in 1804. Sagiv summons up the memory of the great C.L.R. James, who grasped the uniqueness of the success of the revolt, while also noting that “the massacre of whites was a tragedy.”  Sagiv altogether rejects Beinart’s comparison to the Haitian revolt. In his view, Zionism was its own anti-colonial movement of national liberation, which itself has been subject to repeated attacks by a brutal genocidal enemy. From this perspective, it is no surprise that he cannot see that Beinart was shaken to the core by October 7 and gravely disappointed that erstwhile friends on the left failed to condemn the massacre of civilians on that day.  

While Beinart does not condone October 7 in any way, he does seek to understand the circumstances that prompted the day’s convulsion of violence. That is, he sees it as a result of decades of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestinians, which consistently foreclosed any viable path of non-violent protest. Consequently, he raises for discussion the sensitive question of the legitimacy of armed struggle.  Armed struggle after all was a key tool of Zionist paramilitary groups in Mandatory Palestine, some of whom operated not only against military but civilian targets as well. This distinction is key in debates over what is permitted according to international law. To take up this question, as Beinart does, is discomfiting, especially for those who follow the path of non-violence (as was imparted to me by two great Los Angeles-based advocates, Rev. James Lawson and Rabbi Leonard Beerman). But to raise it is both to acknowledge the centrality of violence in the Zionist struggle and to address a central question in international law.  

There is in Beinart’s book a healthy message of courage. He knows that he is going to be attacked from both sides of the political spectrum. But he is undaunted. He seeks to explain to pro-Palestine activists the depth of a Jewish historical connection to Palestine and why the murder of Israeli civilians is not only illegal and immoral but rends his soul. And he is profoundly disturbed by the ingrained opacity of his fellow Jews, those with whom he aspires to be in dialogue, who remain consumed by the trauma of October 7. “I wish you would summon,” he urges, “some of that righteous anger for the Palestinians slaughtered in even greater numbers.” 

It is easy to dismiss Beinart as a self-righteous naïf bent on promoting his own version of a high-minded morality. Indeed, many have. But before continuing down this path, one must ask: How many people are able to resist the chronic Manicheanism that sees good arrayed against evil in predictably one-dimensional terms, preferring instead a perspective that attends to the well-being of Palestinians and Jews without ignoring the yawning power differential between them? How many people marshal their political imagination to think beyond the current dead-end in which advocates of two states will away the presence of hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers and advocates of a single state blithely assume that Jews and Palestinians will rejoice at the prospect of living together as equal citizens without any thought given to the strong form of cultural groupness that both possess and will want to preserve? And how many people are capable of forging a credible argument that the urgent demand for Palestinian liberation is a Jewish moral imperative of the highest order?  

Beinart joins a spate of recent others who have critiqued the use and abuse of Jewish power in Israel, including Mikhael Manekin in End of Days, Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Message, and (as reviewed in these pages) Pankaj Mishra in The World After Gaza. Amidst this impressive roster, he puts forward his own voice of ethical probity drawn from a practice so often lacking in political discourse: unsparing self-criticism. Rather than being vilified or mocked, Beinart deserves to be commended for an honest, brave, and self-revealing book that insists that Jewish ethical and spiritual fulfillment cannot be achieved when the yoke of Israeli oppression continues to weigh heavily upon Palestinians, forestalling further their long-deferred liberation.