On Peter Beinart’s latest appeal to American Jews
It’s hard to say where my anger came from, chiding Uncle Eddie at the Rosh Hashanah dinner table. But suffice to say I wasn’t the only person surprised by the verbal assault. Ed had just finished telling me about his advocacy work with the Canadian Conservative Party; how their support for Israel was critical at a time like this, a moment when woke scavengers roam the universities hunting for Jewish blood. Have you been following the synagogue attacks, he asked. Do you see the number of people wandering around the streets in keffiyeh? We need to be prepared, we need to be protected. He told me of efforts to bring back the Jewish Defense League, a paralegal force of determined citizens operating on the streets of Toronto because the police couldn’t be trusted. It worked on the Lower East Side in the thirties, he said, and it’ll work now.
I tried and failed to hide my amusement, thinking about a group of boomers, bloated after finishing their supper, patrolling Thornhill in orthotic shoes, second-hand bayonets purchased from the army surplus store to save a couple bucks. I suggested that militance might be the reason we’re in this situation in the first place, so maybe the Jews need to stop operating outside the law? Not when you have a racist, anti-semitic prime minister, he shot back. (Trudeau hadn’t yet stepped down.) A spineless, two-faced, sub-human who can’t bring himself to stand up to the woke mob. Do you follow Richard Hanania, Ed asked. How about Gad Saad? Do you follow Bari Weiss?
In fact, I did. And I had been for many years—consuming the drip-drip of their respective twitter feeds like a dutiful masochist accepting torture for the sin of being liberal. I knew the points and counterpoints—this wouldn’t be the first dinner table at which I’d assume the role of generational antagonist. Before the meal, I told myself that I wouldn’t react because I already knew his point of view and it was fine that we disagreed. I wasn’t going to change his mind. He wouldn’t change mine. I could use his angry blather as a temperature check on the current state of conservative boomer hysterics. It was Rosh Hashanah after all, a time dedicated to intentionally starting the year anew. Patience would be my virtue.
But there was something about his crusade that irked me. His assumption that our disagreement was based on informational grounds. I just hadn’t done my homework. I was blind to the realities on the ground—a reality where Jews were on the verge of a second holocaust. This time, there was no way we’d walk like sheep to the slaughter. Not with Israel to protect us. Not if we were organized, prepared to fight; even if the whole world disagreed with our sense of justice. I fantasized that I could enter his dreams, and, in them, I was the young, promising Berlin banker, starting his career in the thirties, attempting to assuage his family’s fear of impending apocalypse. In his wizened old age he’d gained the capacity for foresight, gleaned from a disciplined study of history, unlike the cranky, distracted, phone-obsessed youth. So this was his attempt to rattle me from the cave, wake me up to the new rules of our harsh 21st century reality. There was empathy in the gesture, I realized. Even love. But quickly, the venom boiled over, rising through my insides like baking soda in an elementary school science experiment. “Of course you like those people,” I shot back harshly. “Their work is supposed to rile up people like you: bored, anti-intellectual boomers, looking for purpose.”
The table was shocked. My face grew warm, and I could feel sweat pooling around my armpits. I attempted to walk back the statement but it was too late. The words lingered in a plume, developing their own weather system. The next day I called Ed to apologize, but he wasn’t impressed. Imagine hearing those words from a person you once held as a baby, he said. I tried to imagine. I explained that my frustration wasn’t about him. He could believe whatever he wanted. It’s about being always in-between: too sympathetic for the activists; too critical for the Jews. Mostly, I’m just horrified by the death and destruction, I said. Horrified by the people speaking on my behalf. The blindness. The militance. The endless stream of reductive, caustic takes. He said he could accept my apology, but at this time, he couldn’t forgive. What had been said had been said. I decided that I would apologize three times—tail between my legs, execute the customary pattern of Jewish forgiveness: three times the charm.
And this is what I was thinking about as I picked up Peter Beinart’s new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. It’s a good title because it speaks to something that many Jews realize, if only subconsciously: that on some fundamental level, our positionality in the world has changed. The cultural algorithm of the post-war years have been scrambled. The previous set of political alignments no longer hold. The pendulum that reached its parallax in the ovens of Auschwitz has swung so hard in the other direction that it’s caused a deformation. Not only as a matter of public relations, but spiritually, too. Much like the Jews of 70 C.E who were forced, after the destruction of the Second Temple, to figure out what Judaism might become without a central place of worship, Jews today are also being forced to rewrite the rules of Jewish identity. How can a Judaism built on the values of Lo Tirtzach and Ve’ahavta Lereacha Kamocha accommodate the reality of murdered Palestinian children and targeted civilians and journalists? How can safety be accomplished when we’ve created a machine that makes so many other people unsafe?
Fittingly, the book is addressed to one of Beinart’s friends, whose reaction to October 7th, he explains, led to the collapse of their friendship. After witnessing the grotesque celebration of Israeli death among activists on the American left, his friend decided he could no longer maintain the friendship if these were the circles that Beinart moved within. It’s a familiar story that’s gone in both directions since war broke out: friends unfollowed, acquaintances muted, decades long relationships ushered to a close. But rather than take it personally, Beinart uses the conflict as the seed for his creativity, asking why, instead of facing what’s happening in Gaza, so many Jews have opted to retreat into their own self-created silos. Why have so many otherwise progressive Jews—Jews who marched in civil rights protests in the seventies, advocated for queer rights in the eighties—turned off the part of their brain that should be able to see—in the death of forty-thousand (fifty-thousand?) people and the complete obliteration of Gaza—a moral abomination? Why, instead of protesting the actions being taken in our name, advocating for the kind of pluralistic response that’s historically underwritten Jewish safety, have mainstream Jewish organizations allied themselves with the nativist Right and, in some cases, literal Nazis?
Beinart’s answer, more or less, is that it’s uncomfortable. The notion that Jews have become tormentors—the oppressors—stands in the face of our basic identity as victims, that it’s been difficult to really see what’s being broadcast daily on our screens. The memory of the Holocaust has been transformed into a kind of epistemic shield, so that facts on the ground—a city turned to rubble, children covered in plaster and dust, hospitals filled to capacity with impaled, bleeding bodies—are unable to penetrate. Instead, many Jews, and especially the mainstream Zionist organizations, have spent their time mounting arguments about human shields and inaccurate death tolls, fixating on the number of anti-semitic incidents roiling American cities. It’s not that these incidents aren’t relevant, Beinart argues. It’s not that Jewish students don’t have a right to feel safe on campus. But the failure to confront the problem at the root of these issues—the fact that Israel systematically discriminates against Palestinians, and is currently committing war crimes—reveals that many Jews, without knowing it, are practicing what Beinart calls a form of idolatry. Go to any synagogue and question the existence of God and that’s okay, Beinart points out. Question the moral fiber of the IDF and your welcome will be short-lived. According to Beinart, the fears of the past have been elevated to their own form of secular religion, and instead of making us stronger it’s making us more vulnerable.
Beinart’s solution to Jewish blindness is deceptively simple: write a book mired in references to the Torah, to the canon of Jewish cultural production and insider shtick, that seduces Jews to trust the author’s intentions, his commitment to Judaism and Israeli society, so that when he tells them that the story they’ve been holding onto is a false one—when he explains that October 7 is better seen like a brutal, Native American attack on encroaching Westerners than an act of Jihadi terror—the part of the brain that shuts off every time someone asserts themself as ‘the other side,’ the Hamas sympathizer, the Nazi laying in wait, doesn’t shut off, and instead inspires a process of awakening, like an enlightened captive of post-traumatic Stockholm Syndrome.
The captor, in this instance, is the mainstream Zionist organizations—the Jewish lobby—who claim to protect Jews and Israelis but systematically fail to do so, as evidenced by the events of October 7. The problem with these organizations is not that they have bad intentions, Beinart argues. The problem is that they’re operating on a false theory of what produces violent anti-semitism from Palestinians and white supremacists alike. The mainstream story pits Israelis against Palestinians, Jews against the protestors, and argues that violence is inherent to the region and to Islamic resistance, so that the only way to fight violence is with even greater violence and feats of strength. A project with no apparent limit—legal, moral, or otherwise.
But the reality, according to Beinart, is that Jewish and Palestinian safety are intrinsically intertwined, unthinkable without relation to the violence of the other side. So the only way to manufacture true safety is through mutual discourse, reckoning, and conciliation. Thinking about safety as a dance, and violence as politics through other means. Trust that if Palestinians are given a voice, not just within Israel but throughout the diaspora, inside synagogues and other Jewish organizations—that if Palestinians are given meaningful channels of self-determination—then violence will simply become a less appealing option. According to Beinart, the history of the last twenty five years—a period of Israeli politics defined, paradigmatically, by its application of Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall theory—reveals that safety through the mass accrual of guns, walls, and shields simply doesn’t work. Chaos will always enter when it’s least expected. There will always be a break in the fence. So the only way to respond is to change the approach. Treat people fairly and see what happens. Stop building settlements, stop the machine of Israeli state violence. But that means changing our stories, en masse having Jews modify our victimized, embattled point of view.
Of course, it’s easier said than done. As I was reading through Beinart’s plea, I was reminded of the last time I found my spirits lifted as a result of his work: in 2020, when he published a multi-part essay in Jewish Currents advocating for a one-state solution. Elated by the prospect of peace in the Middle East, I sent the series to my cousin Susie, a decidedly left-wing Israeli political activist, who spent most of her career advancing the goals of Meretz, one of Israel’s few political parties with both Palestinian and Israeli representatives. “Ha!” she laughed in my face, “the hubris of Liberals. A completely unrealistic plan, detached from reality.” I didn’t bother arguing back, and perhaps it’s indicative that, this time, I didn’t even send her the book. Too focused on American Jews, anyway. I did, however, attempt to convince my parents to read it, emphasizing how the author is stridently Jewish. There’s references to the Torah! I claimed. He wears a kippah! Wishfully, I placed the book on my mothers bedside table, hoping she’d pick it up. As far as I know, the book is still sitting there unopened.
And in some ways, that’s really what it means to be Jewish after the destruction of Gaza: bumping up in conversation with people’s deepest pathologies—their ideas of safety—over and over again, expecting to meet a person governed by reason, and instead finding reactions as if you’d claimed their mother, or child, was a monster. In the aftermath of the Uncle Ed affair, I sat around the kitchen island sparring with my mother, who claimed that, beyond her interpersonal gripes with my explosion, she agreed with him on this issue. I feel unsafe, she said. The people here hate us. They wear Palestinian head-dress. They chant from the river to the sea. I asked her if, prior to this year, she’d ever had a real, anti-semitic incident in the thirty years she’d lived in this city. No, not really, she responded, besides the odd ‘k*ke’ dropped at a hockey game, or subtle joke about Jewish money. What’s your point? My point was that it was easier to rewrite thirty years of history to include an invisible layer of anti-semitism than to interpret support for Palestinians as a reasonable response to an unjust war by sympathetic teenagers who feel morally culpable. It was easier to hear ‘second holocaust’ in ‘from the river to the sea’ than to scrape through the connotative meaning until you can hear a call for freedom, even if the desire for blood is still there.
And yet…do I blame her? I was also raised to evaluate the character of the non-Jews around me by asking if they’d hide me in their cupboards should a new Nazi regime come to power. And this was in the nineties! I understand that, in the language of the brain, ‘Mother’ is not even your actual mother, and ‘Safety’ has only little to do with the proximity of dangerous people. Which is precisely why it’s so difficult to think seriously about an end to the conflict: hatred is much deeper than the skin. Distrust can take lifetimes to repair, if it’s repaired at all. People will sooner become obscene than risk their families safety. Patterns set in motion during childhood die a million deaths before they actually die. More likely, they become a fetish.
And that’s part of the reason that arguments about Israel often feel so pointless and empty, despite their life and death stakes. Beinart is right to argue that Jews need new stories, for the same reason we all need new stories: to loosen the grip of hardened reality, so we can imagine something new. But the kinds of stories that Beinart recommends are not ones that actually help us explain ourselves. Mainly, they’re agitprop—political arguments in another form. He suggests that, instead of seeing Purim as a story about the Jews’ fight for survival against a genocidal enemy, we should remember the next part of the story, when they launch their own murderous crusade. Instead of clinging to violence as a form of safety, consider South African reintegration, when a group of Black militants, once seen by Whites as intrinsically violent, were given the power of political self-determination, and then decided to let their violence fall away. It’s not that these stories don’t serve a purpose. We need utopian metaphors and political histories. But to escape the cycle we also need stories that tend to the psychological mess, the co-existence of good and bad intentions, our propensity for deception, the theatre of the self. Which is to say, we need actual literature. Stories about false theories and stupid accidents, where nobody is washed clean. Stories with irony and comedy and deception, please.
Because, in this situation, nobody is clean. In my experience, the best conversations I’ve had since the war broke out have been built on this foundation—with both Jews and Arabs alike. That there is no good and evil, just bad and worse. That all the politicians are lying through their teeth. That the Arab countries use antisemitism to avoid political criticism. That the Israelis use the threat of violence to keep themselves in power. That Hamas uses whisper networks to silence opposition. That Israel itself is like an open air prison, with surveillance capabilities that even Stalin would admire. That Settlers are missionary extremists. That so are the Jihadis. And so on and so on. In the words of Philip Roth, spoken through the mouth of a Palestinian mother in Operation Shylock: “Palestine is a lie! Zionism is a lie! Diasporism is a lie!”
The point is not to equivocate. Only one side has been executing a genocidal war. But it’s this process of narrative collapse—the elimination of nuance—that, for me, has been the most frustrating part of being Jewish after the destruction of Gaza. It’s watching as words like ‘zionism’ and ‘anti-semitism’ lose their meaning. It’s shouting matches at the shabbos table over whether to use the word ‘genocide.’ Fire bombs at your high school; Nazi salutes at the Trump rally; whispers at the vigil that make you feel uncomfortable; embarrassment over the tone deaf posts from your high school acquaintances. It’s watching uneasily as Jews are thrust into the center of world events once again; shame in watching the brutality of a society that you love. Being called a traitor for believing in the integrity of Israel’s people; a self-hating Jew for opposing the proliferation of death.
In this sense, being Jewish after the destruction of Gaza is not too dissimilar from being an American these days. Or being Ukrainian, Turkish, Hungarian; really any place where events seem to be spinning out of control. Which is to say, most places. It’s political homelessness, being stuck in a scenario that seems to only get worse, or at least more uncertain. Paralyzed by callousness, paralyzed by indifference, paralyzed by outright stupidity and fear of reprisal.
In this book, Beinart has produced a work of optimism, an attempt to break the doom loop of linguistic paralysis by asking Jews’ to look seriously at themselves, to consider the meaning of Judaism in the aftermath of a cataclysm. He doesn’t quite answer this question, but he does point in the right direction. Why not a reckoning?
Sam Venis is a writer based in Brooklyn.
This article first appeared on Sam Venis’ Substack “Technical Personae.”