Andrew Apostolou reviews Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, arguing that the author’s discussion of Hamas parades his conversion from foreign policy wonkery to the populist left that has abandoned Enlightenment principles and humane values.
Peter Beinart’s latest book challenges the American Jewish consensus that favours Israel. Shocked by Israel’s war in Gaza, Beinart castigates American Jews’ sense of ‘victimhood,’ which he claims muffles the suffering of Palestinians. He declares: ‘This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams.’
Beinart is a public intellectual who diagnoses policy problems and issues prescriptions. His first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (2006), praised the liberal foreign policy of the Cold War as a model for the war on terror. Beinart then cautioned against foreign policy ambition in The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (2010).
Neither The Good Fight nor The Icarus Syndrome contained much mention of Israel. Beinart turned to the future of Zionism in a 2010 New York Review of Books essay.[1] He argued that Israel could not remain Jewish and democratic if it continued to rule millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories. In particular, he enjoined American Jewish groups to be more willing to criticise Israeli policies. Beinart expanded his views in The Crisis of Zionism (2012). He wrote as an engaged liberal, scathing of the extreme left and of its comparisons with apartheid: ‘Israel is not South Africa, not by a long shot.’[2]
In 2020, however, Beinart forsook Zionism. Instead, he called in The New York Times for a binational state.[3] In this new book, Beinart abandons the intricacies of policy debates. Although Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza discusses the war, it is often a bill of attainder against American Jews. By the end, it becomes a confessional work.
The disinterest in policy, in the details that used to animate his books, is apparent from Beinart’s discussion of the war. He is outraged by Israel’s devastating, bloody counterattack and its effects on Gaza’s civilians. A moral response to needless suffering should start with why it is happening. Beinart discusses the propaganda justifications for Israel’s military operations, not the actuality of the war’s prosecution. A book about Being Jewish should examine the IDF’s problematic interpretation of International Humanitarian Law given that international law and Israeli military law draw on Jewish sources.[4] On the rare occasion Beinart gets into detail, he gets it wrong. He claims that Israel violated the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, a document Israel has not signed.[5] Similarly, he reports that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to stop its Rafah offensive. It did not. The ICJ cautioned Israel as to how it conducted its operations.[6]
The lack of attention to the fine points is because Beinart objects to the very existence of Israel. He argues that Israel represents Jewish supremacism, not liberation from statelessness. The end of the conflict will not come from reconciling two national movements, from the ‘untidy accommodation’ that the late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Zionism’s great historian, promoted.[7] Instead, Beinart desires the overthrow of Zionism, like the fall of apartheid.
So noxious is Zionism to Beinart that he believes we should be rid of the very name ‘Israel.’ He reasons that ‘Israel’ represents Jewish supremacism because it is a reference to Jews as a people. By that logic, many countries need to change their names. Deutschland means the land of the Germans. That’s before we get to England, Scotland, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. One could go on. Beinart agrees with calls to change the name to ‘Israel-Palestine’ or ‘Palestine-Israel.’ He has missed the late Col. Gadaffi’s more concise suggestion: ‘Isratine.’[8]
Beinart gives similarly short shrift to American Jewish organisations for their supposed complicity in Israel’s war. Some of what these organisations have to say is dreary propaganda. For example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) declared that ‘Hamas is solely responsible for the civilian casualties in Gaza.’[9] Still, Beinart does not cite examples that demonstrate support for war crimes. Rather, he imputes guilt by insinuation.
Beinart cannot make sense of Israel-Diaspora relations because he wants to abolish one half of the equation, and he despises the other half. He does not comprehend how diasporas work and what makes American Jews distinct. A diaspora connected to a democratic state generally defers to the elected government, no matter how odious. Moreover, breaking from most other diasporas, the American Jewish diaspora that Beinart disdains, actually promotes policies in opposition to Israel’s right wing. Unlike, for example Armenian or Greek groups in their homelands, American Jews invest in peacebuilding and inclusion in Israel.[10]
A book on Being Jewish should reflect on the impact of October 7 on diaspora Jews. Israel, the one place that since 1948 Jews had believed to be safe, became a charnel house. Diaspora Jews became targets of antisemites celebrating the October 7 massacres, which Hamas called ‘Al Aqsa Flood.’[11] Many feel that the Netanyahu government abandoned the hostages, violating Israel’s founding values and Judaism.
Although Beinart claims he wants to change Jewish opinion, he scolds American Jewish organisations for calling October 7 a ‘modern-day pogrom.’[12] For Beinart, ‘while these historical analogies anchor us, they also cloud our vision.’ In fact, the comparison expresses the fears of diaspora Jews that history is repeating itself. Beinart’s desire to restrict what Jews call their suffering echoes Israeli government unhappiness at Arab organisations calling their 1948 trauma the Nakba.[13] Indeed, Beinart’s indictment of American Jews resembles classical Zionism ‘negation of the Diaspora,’[14] the notion that the diaspora lacks value.
Beinart’s distemper with the diaspora discredits his analysis of antisemitism. He indulges in Boris Johnson-style ‘cakeism,’ the desire to have two incompatible things at once. He denounces antisemitism unequivocally, yet argues that ‘accusations’ of antisemitism are about changing the subject away from Palestinian suffering. According to Beinart, ‘It’s hard to ask Palestinians to care about the feelings of pro-Israel students while Israel slaughters and starves their families.’
Many American Jews experienced hostility for the first time after October 7, particularly those at university. For example, according to Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism, one Jewish student had people ‘banging on her door at all hours of the night, demanding she explain Israel’s actions. She was forced to move out of the dorm.’[15] Beinart’s advice to ‘Zionist students’ is that they ‘must be willing to listen, even when it’s painful.’
Beinart cannot grasp the nettle of antisemitism because he has decided that Jewish victimhood is a cover for Israel’s atrocities. Beinart’s universalism falls short when it comes to Jews. All peoples in all conflicts regard themselves as righteous victims. Jews are no exception. Palestinians are no exception. Blood and tears end when the other side’s anguish aches as much as your own, not when you censor their vocabulary.
Perhaps Beinart’s greatest failing is his discussion of Hamas. Here Beinart parades his conversion from foreign policy wonkery to the populist left that has abandoned Enlightenment principles and humane values. In The Good Fight, Beinart warned of the threat of ‘Qutb’s children,’ the jihadists and their extremist ideology—which includes Hamas.[16] Similarly, in The Crisis of Zionism, Beinart argued that: ‘The left’s obsession with imperialism gets Israel wrong, and sometimes blinds leftists to human rights abuses by postcolonial regimes that deserve their fury.’[17]
Yet that ‘blindness’ now afflicts Beinart. Any advocate for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, whether in two states or one, must face unpleasant facts: that without Benjamin Netanyahu’s failed accommodation of Hamas, without Hamas’s savagery, there would have been no October 7, and no destruction of Gaza.
Hamas, unlike the American Jewish organisations that Beinart castigates, has no illusions about how Israel conducts a war. Hussein Ibish has accused Hamas of the cynical ‘intentional human sacrifice of thousands of Palestinians.’[18] By contrast, Beinart strains to take Hamas at face value. He repeats Mohammed Deif’s claim that October 7 was about Israel and international law, with planning commencing after May 2021.[19] We know, however, that Hamas plotted a similar mass abduction in 2014.[20] It now appears that the late Yahya Sinwar had the idea for ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ in 2016.[21] The time and space to organise came courtesy of Netanyahu, who, like Yasser Arafat before him, believed he could manipulate Hamas. Beinart could have avoided such mistakes if he treated Hamas with the same scepticism he reserved for the Anti-Defamation League.
Palestinians deserve better friends than Beinart. Violence and dispossession have remade Palestinian society with traumatic frequency. More people should support freedom for Palestinians, but that won’t happen with Beinart insinuating that Gaza is a genocide, as epochal an event as the destruction of the Second Temple, the expulsion from Spain, and the Holocaust.
Although the intellectual credibility of this book is dubious, there is no doubt about its personal message. Beinart wants the prestige of being a Jewish community dissident, without the cost.
The book opens with a note to ‘my former friend.’ Beinart castigates his ex-friend’s moral failings: ‘I consider your single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral and self-defeating. It justifies actions that I consider grave crimes. It blinds you to the essential interconnectedness of Jewish and Palestinian safety.’ He regards his ex-friend ‘as a kind of fanatic.’ The Judaism of such Israel supporters is ‘a purely tribal creed,’ that supports ‘mass killing of children.’
Beinart reports the price of his dissent: ‘When I enter a synagogue, I am no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away.’
Such shunning should be a badge of pride. Yet Beinart craves the protection of Diaspora Jews. He writes: ‘And in my nightmares I imagine myself—abandoned by all the enlightened universalists—knocking anxiously at your door.’ Who in his bad dreams is he fleeing? Is it, like the residents of the Gaza envelope, Hamas? He does not tell us, but the tribalism he denounces is rather handy.
Beinart, then, is a dissident à la carte. What a contrast to Václav Havel. The Czech writer worked in a brewery after his exclusion from the theatre. On Beinart’s way of thinking, Havel should have asked the Communist regime to take him to work in a limousine.
The final chapter declares the salvationist nature of this book. Like James Donald Bowman (who now goes by JD Vance), Beinart has seen the error of his ways. He writes as if he were ‘born again’: ‘It was by encountering Palestinians that I realized the depths of the dehumanization I had been carrying inside.’ His Palestinian friends ‘helped me redefine Jewish honor. They changed my understanding of what it means to be a Jew.’ The good news for Beinart’s pro-genocide former friend is that salvation is open to all:
Speaking of Abraham’s descendants in the book of Genesis, God says, ‘All of the earth shall bless themselves by you.’ Perhaps this is what it means for the Jewish people to bless humanity in our time. It means liberating ourselves from supremacy so, as partners with Palestinians, we can help liberate the world.
Other intellectuals have trodden the same path. Paul Johnson was one of Britain’s most important leftist writers before joining the Conservative Party. The late Christopher Booker was unimpressed by the metamorphosis, as are readers of Beinart’s disappointing book. Booker’s judgement of Johnson applies equally to Beinart:
That when a man sees through the folly of one extreme and one-sided view of the world there is no greater danger and no greater likelihood than that he will rush to another, equally extreme and even more one-sided.[22]
Dedicated to the memory of Rena Abravanel Greenup (1936-2025) z”l.
[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/06/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/
[2] Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism, Henry Holt, 2012, page 57.
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/opinion/israel-annexation-two-state-solution.html
[4] https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-justice-requires-in-gaza
[5] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/state-parties?activeTab=1949GCs-APs-and-commentaries
[6] https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204091#:~:text=The%20Court%20considers%20that%2C%20in,in%20whole%20or%20in%20part.
[7] Arthur Hertzberg, ‘A Small Peace for the Middle East’ Foreign Affairs, January/February 2001 (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2001-01-01/small-peace-middle-east-0); Arthur Hertzberg, The Fate of Zionism: A Secular Future for Israel and Palestine, HarperSanFrancisco 2003. This author conducted research for Hertzberg and edited the book.
[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20040401210146/http://www.algathafi.org/medialeast/INDEX-E.HTM
[9] https://www.aipac.org/gaza-war-faqs#:~:text=Hamas%20is%20solely%20responsible%20for%20the%20civilian%20casualties%20in%20Gaza.
[10] https://www.iataskforce.org/.
[11] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68288727#:~:text=The%20CST%20said%20this%20suggested%20that%20the%20increase%20%22was%20a%20celebration%20of%20the%20Hamas%20attack%20on%20Israel%2C%20rather%20than%20anger%20at%20Israel%27s%20military%20response%20in%20Gaza.%22
[12] Statement here https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2023-10/Community-Letter-to-University-Presidents-2023.pdf#page=2.
[13] https://web.archive.org/web/20230503094502/https://fs.knesset.gov.il/18/law/18_lsr_301085.pdf
[14] שלילת הגלות (shlitat hagalut) in Hebrew. Famously debated by Simon Dubnow and Ahad Ha’am.
[15] https://www.columbia.edu/content/sites/default/files/content/about/Task%20Force%20on%20Antisemitism/Report-2-Task-Force-on-Antisemitism.pdf#page=14.
[16] Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—And Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, Harper, 2006, Chapter Four, ‘Qutb’s Children,’ pages 88-111.
[17] Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism, Henry Holt, 2012, page 57.
[18] https://newrepublic.com/article/176512/palestinian-people-enraged-israel-hamas#:~:text=Hamas%E2%80%99s%20cynicism%20is%20so%20profound%20that%20it%E2%80%99s%20no%20exaggeration%20to%20call%20it%20an%20intentional%20human%20sacrifice%20of%20thousands%20of%20Palestinians%20in%20a%20desperate%20bid%20to%20increase%20the%20organization%E2%80%99s%20decades%2Dlong%20quest%20for%20dominance%20of%20the%20national%20movement.
[19] The Reuters report on Deif is here https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-elusive-hamas-leader-deif-masterminded-oct-7-attack-on-israel/.
[20] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2014/10/gaza-tunnel-plot-israeli-intelligence?srsltid=AfmBOormroNvb-5O8MFIcXLyp7YBsN3-O9-z0_GyBtu-hHHwheppnqXX
[21] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/28/israel-hamas-oct7-gaza/#:~:text=Sinwar%20began%20to%20conceive%20of%20a%20major%20assault%20launched%20from%20Gaza%20as%20early%20as%20November%202016.%20The%20plan%20to%20attack%20Israel%20was%20approved%20in%20July%202019
[22] Christopher Booker, The Seventies: Portrait of a Decade, Penguin 1980, page 244.
