Being Jewish After Peter Beinart

He wants his anonymous “former friend” from shul (synagogue) back, and that means convincing him and other American Jews that based on Jewish values, Israel should cease to exist. Friends are in short supply for Beinart, who seeks to portray himself as a good-faith, constructive critic of Israel—an effort that has backfired, sometimes spectacularly. At a Harvard book talk, Beinart described terrorist attacks, including the 1974 Ma’alot massacre— an indiscriminate massacre of Israeli civilians followed by a mass hostage-taking at an elementary school akin to a miniaturized October 7—as “Palestinian armed resistance against civilians.” Buckling to public criticism, Beinart apologized for his “serious mistake” and “failure of judgment”—but it was instead for the crime of appearing before an audience of Israelis at Tel Aviv University, implicitly violating the norms of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Beinart’s strategy for credibility is to briefly concede some fact and then spend the rest of his time undermining its implications. Beinart, out of “a spirit of Jewish solidarity and love,” tells his friend in the preface that he quite generously “still considers himself a Jewish loyalist.” Really? He compares himself to the paradigmatic Jewish heretic in the Talmud, the sage-turned brutal Roman quisling named Acher. “Who was Acher?” the Jerusalem Talmud asks (Chagigah 2:1), before answering. “Elisha ben Abuya, who killed the children of Torah.” In a non-Jewish context, this would be akin to professing admiration for Philippe Pétain while simultaneously claiming to represent the highest ideals of French republicanism. Then, just in time for Purim, when Jews celebrate their deliverance from the foiled genocide plot in ancient Persia detailed in the Book of Esther, The Guardian published an excerpt from Beinart’s book. Instead of celebrating Purim, Beinart argued that Jews should mourn. The victims of the Book of Esther were not, as one might presume, the Jews decreed to be killed to the last man, woman and child, but their would-be murderers—the men described as their “enemies”—whom the Jews slew first. “With the blood of their foes barely dry,” Beinart bemoans, “the Jews feast and make merry.” Worse, Beinart ties Purim not only to Israel’s conduct in Gaza, but also to the founding of the State of Israel itself, whose very name is an act of “Jewish supremacy.” It is easy enough to poke fun at Beinart’s contradictions, such as the lengths he goes to (sometimes fairly) to object to Jews viewing themselves as perpetual “righteous victims,” only to then ascribe innocence to their would-be destroyers in contemporary Palestine and ancient Persia. Or how Beinart, in The New Yorker, describes his evolution from liberal Zionist to anti-Zionist as an epiphany resulting from listening to Tucker Carlson describing America as an “ethnostate” akin to Israel, as if Gaza is somehow a multicultural terror-statelet, only to end up regurgitating the same views on Purim and Israel as Tucker. But after October 7, after the Hezbollah-inspired car-ramming attack at one of the largest synagogues in the United States last month, after the deadly terror attacks at a Manchester synagogue last October, and after the Bondi Beach shooting in Sydney during a Hanukkah celebration last December, Beinart’s arguments cross the line into the obscene. It is an understatement for Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, to describe Beinart’s column (also published in The Guardian) as “hateful invective.” The rest of his book is worse. Beinart knows what he is doing when he says Jews “fear” they will “see Gaza’s burning, starving flesh” not just in “our prayer books” but also “on the walls of our synagogues and Jewish Community Centers, at our Passover seders and Shabbat meals.” He knows what he means when he calls Jews “children of Korach” fueled by his “heresy of intrinsic Jewish sanctity” because Jews apparently think God made them better than everyone else. He also knows that Hamas is “a corrupt and despotic organization with a long history of brutality,” and yet he is the editor-at-large of a left-wing Jewish magazine whose editorial position is to refuse “to condemn the Hamas attacks.” Beinart is not dumb. He is making these accusations because he wants American Jews to turn out their pockets to proactively demonstrate that they are not connected to Israel—only then will they be safe from antisemitism and only then will his anti-Zionist friends come back. In this way, Beinart is more messianic than the most fevered Israeli settler in the West Bank: he believes, with no sense of self-effacement, that dismantling Israel into a binational state will lead to peace and not exponentially more bloodshed. Beinart wants not a Jewish state, but a Jewish home within Israel–Palestine. In short, a return to the status quo ante under British Mandate Palestine and the Balfour Declaration, though presumably without the British to keep the peace. “What other place on Earth could more effectively rouse humanity from its desolation and birth a new age of freedom?” Beinart asks. To dissolve Israel is a divine mission—he points to God’s promise to Abraham that all of the earth’s families will be blessed by his descendants, the Jews—since “it means liberating ourselves from supremacy so, as partners with Palestinians, we can help liberate the world.” There is almost no journalistic line that Beinart would not cross to turn this vision into a reality, and albeit with a different gloss, Beinart’s newest book bears striking parallels with his previous book, The Crisis of Zionism (2012). So similar are the two books that Beinart even repackages the same misquote. It is a telling error: Beinart in both books needed to make the case that Israel is genocidal, and its efforts for peace with Palestinians self-serving. Beinart quotes from the former chief negotiator for Israel, Shlomo Ben-Ami, during the first Camp David and later Taba peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, that “if I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected the Camp David Accords.” The point is clear: even Israeli negotiators believed that by offering peace they were giving a rotten deal to the Palestinians. These words were indeed said by Ben-Ami, and in the right order. The problem is the next words that Ben-Ami said: “But [the] Taba [summit] is the problem. The Clinton parameters are the problem.” Israel’s government, against the advice of its military, proposed to cede 96 of the West Bank, 4 of Israel in land swaps, the entirety of the Gaza Strip, and even more shockingly from an Israeli perspective, divide a united Jerusalem in two. Bill Clinton said it was the best possible peace agreement that the Palestinians would ever get. Arafat declined. “I’m a colossal failure,” Bill Clinton told Arafat, “and you made me one.” Beinart twists facts to claim that Clinton was wrong about the Clinton Parameters, and that in actuality both Palestinians and Israelis agreed to Clinton’s overtures. This is not to say that Beinart’s views haven’t changed. His transition from Zionist to liberal Zionist and now to anti-Zionist is complete. In itself, this is not necessarily objectionable; reasonable people can expect to change their minds upon learning of new facts. But that is not what has happened with Beinart. The situation between Israelis and Palestinians has stayed the same—only his desire for validation has intensified. A decade ago, Beinart unashamedly could say “Israel, as I’ve argued repeatedly, is not an apartheid state. If it were, Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Muslim, would be in jail, not in the Knesset. Nor is South Africa’s transformation a model for Israel’s.” Ahmed Tibi is still in the Knesset, appointed twice the deputy speaker of the Knesset, and based on recent polling, could serve as the kingmaker in the next Israeli election to end Prime Minister Netanyahu’s premiership for good. But Beinart now argues that Israel is an apartheid state, “denies all of them [Palestinians] legal equality,” and a strategy of international isolation akin to what ended apartheid in South Africa is the solution. Both of Beinart’s books are riddled with errors such as these, but Gaza is astonishingly self-contradictory at times. Consider the litany of complaints against Israel, from idolatry to genocide. Beinart has the chutzpah to call Israel an apartheid state, and at the same time, decry that Israel is anti-Jewish because “there is no religious requirement for election” to the Israeli parliament as opposed to the requirement to support Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Should Ahmed Tibi not be allowed to serve in the Knesset because he is Muslim? There is much to decry about Beinart’s work, but at least it is a short read. Yet even by the end, it is surprising how dated many of his arguments are. If at the start of the conflict, Israeli officials were questioning the number of casualties reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, by the end it is the anti-Israeli activists and scholars who question the death toll as too low. Clearly, for many influential Palestinian activists, not enough Palestinians have died. Beinart’s claim that Israel is performing human sacrifices, a paganistic korban offering, is much closer to being true among those who wish for an apocalyptic death toll in Gaza to finally justify the isolation of Israel. Beinart is right to say that “Palestinians, like all people, are responsible for their actions,” and that the two current Palestinian quasi-states are torn between Hamas, which is a “moral disaster,” and the Palestinian Authority that is run by “a corrupt authoritarian and a Holocaust denier.” It is a shame that Beinart cannot connect these two thoughts together.