Peter Beinart begins Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning—a provocative and incisive book about trauma and Jewish identity after October 7, 2023—with a note to an unnamed former friend whose fanaticism about Israel he’d come to view as unacceptable. The note reflects the painful divisions that have deepened within Jewish communities in the aftermath of Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent, grotesque destruction of Gaza. In deeply felt, achingly personal terms that will surely resonate with millions of Jews in the United States and throughout the world, Beinart argues that far too many Jews are so committed to that with which they identify—the Israeli hostages, Israel, and Zionism itself—that they have somehow neglected, or even cavalierly dismissed, the lives and suffering of millions of Palestinians. His note concludes with a plea: “I hope the rupture is not final.”
But it very well might be final. Israel is the touchiest subject among Jews—almost a taboo topic in many circles—and the state’s genocidal campaign in Gaza will likely destroy long-standing friendships and family relationships, perhaps even permanently. Tensions are enormously fraught. I’ve seen it first-hand in my encounters with friends, associates, and my students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), many of whom are Jews whose perspectives mirror those that Beinart’s book sets out to critique.
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
By Peter Beinart
Knopf, 176 pages
Publication date: January 28, 2025
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza mounts a righteous assault on the present state of contemporary mainstream Jewish identity. In the book’s prologue, Beinart is forthright: “We Need a New Story.” He calls out Jews who have concluded that protecting themselves requires subjugating others, even if they are personally pained by Gaza’s agony. He demands a new narrative, one that is based on equality rather than supremacy. This is an extremely difficult proposition for many Jews; the blinders of conquest, domination, oppression, and moral indifference are now deeply ingrained in the minds of millions of Jews in Israel and throughout the Jewish Diaspora. In many cases, this is even an unconscious process, because it emerges from family, religious communities, and social groups. Regrettably, this dynamic has been reinforced in the United States by powerful institutions and organizations such as the American Jewish Congress (AJC), American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League, and other advocacy groups, as well as many campus chapters of the pro-Israel Jewish student organization Hillel.
The origins of Jewish supremacy in Israel trace back to long before the country’s official formation. Before the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, Jews made up about a third of its population. To create and maintain a Jewish majority, Zionist forces expelled around 750,000 Palestinians—an inconvenient and highly disconcerting truth for many Jews today. As a result, Beinart persuasively argues, far too many Israelis and Diaspora Jews have relied on euphemisms, vagueness, and even outright lies to conceal the egregious human rights abuses that underlie the creation of the modern Israeli state.
Israel controls the entirety of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, though it withdrew its troops from Gaza twenty years ago before reinvading it after October 7, 2023. Israeli soldiers can arrest and torment whomever they want—they have free rein, and they exercise it with brutal efficiency, with little or no regard for the dignity of their Palestinian captives.
Beinart notes that Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have labelled Israel’s governance of the region as apartheid. It’s an unsavory designation, but an accurate one, practiced in this case by the descendants of those murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust. No amount of verbal acrobatics can conceal this ugly reality.
Knopf
Beinart understands perfectly the trauma that Hamas’s October 7 attack wrought for Jews in Israel and elsewhere. It would be both foolish and morally grotesque to downplay the impact of that day on Jews throughout the world: I felt it personally, especially as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. But despite what Benjamin Netanyahu and the standard Jewish establishment, including pro-Israel lobbying groups throughout the world have claimed, it was not a crime comparable to the Holocaust.
Beinart notes that Jews in Israel enjoy legal supremacy while Palestinians lack basic freedoms. This is a significant distinction, and while making it in no way absolves Hamas for its carnage, it’s important to note that Israel has its own deeper responsibility for the historical oppression of Palestinians, including those effectively imprisoned in Gaza. Insisting on this truth can result in the loss of relationships within Jewish families and communities, as was the case in Beinart’s own family.
It’s much harder to be Jewish after the destruction of Gaza. Beinart notes that in the aftermath of October 7, many Jews, including educators, rabbis, and community leaders, have made a point to speak out about the Israelis who were killed or kidnapped during Hamas’s attack. They’ve spoken at length about the victims’ personalities, their hopes and dreams, and their entire family histories. Who could be unmoved by these heartfelt and emotional expressions of grief and sorrow?
But this communal outpouring of grief was also distressingly tribal, and often came without mention of the Palestinian casualties in Gaza or the stories of those victims. The Palestinian lives shattered by Israeli bombs and bullets—women, men, children, grandmothers, grandfathers, disabled people—were regarded as little more than statistics to be disputed. In taking stock of this chilling reality, Beinart laments that Judaism has been redefined into a purely selfish creed, devoid of any genuine notion of universal love and empathy.
Meanwhile, the carnage in Gaza has slowly but unmistakably developed into outright genocide. Yet far too many Jews in America and elsewhere pay scant attention. Some blame Hamas itself: They brought it on themselves; What did they expect?; They hide among civilians; Israel has to defend itself before the terrorists destroy it.” Israel’s utterly egregious and often lethal attacks on hospitals, universities, journalists, and helpless civilians have shocked the conscience of the world, yet many Jews have maintained indifference and outright callousness toward Palestinian suffering through these rationalizations for its disproportionate aggression.
One of the most insidious methods by which the Israeli government and its enablers have avoided responsibility is claiming that any opposition reflects the new antisemitism. The ADL, AIPAC, the AJC, and their rightwing allies, including so-called Christian Zionists, have been effective in labelling anti-Zionism, or really any criticism of Israel, as antisemitic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s depiction of American campuses as awash with Nazi-like antisemitic mobs, Beinart writes, is both cynical and absurd. But he also acknowledges elements of anti-Jewish sentiment and action that have arisen within parts of the Palestine solidarity protest movement.
Here, I feel compelled to add my own addendum to Beinart’s observation. Like many other schools, including Columbia University, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA has been a prominent site of anti-Israel protests. Having personally witnessed many, participated in some, and written about the overall phenomenon, my conclusion is that antisemitic incidents associated with these protests were relatively minor, regrettable, and largely perpetrated by overzealous young knuckleheads. Every instance of antisemitism is unacceptable and should be vigorously condemned.
But to make the leap to claiming that UCLA is a hostile environment for Jewish students, faculty, and staff strikes me as preposterous. The most significant act of violence during the protests at UCLA occurred on May 1, 2024, when a group of “pro-Israeli” demonstrators destroyed the peaceful Free Palestine encampment, whose ranks contained a substantial number of Jewish participants. I would label these demonstrators “Zionist thugs,” and I’m not going to retreat from that designation.
ADL National Director Jonathan Greenblatt has insisted that Zionism and Jewishness are inseparable: Reject Zionism and you’re no longer a Jew. But as Beinart makes clear, Greenblatt and the ADL have no mandate to define who is a Jew. The notion that they could do so is as insulting and offensive as the boorish audience members who have occasionally called me a “self-hating Jew” when I have criticized Israel during presentations.
This tendentious redefinition of antisemitism—“the new new antisemitism,” as Beinart calls it—is part of a concerted pretext to blunt any serious critique of Israeli atrocities. At present, the Trump Administration is misusing the label of antisemitism to coerce colleges, universities, and businesses into adhering to regressive educational and commercial policies. These actions have nothing to do with actual antisemitism. Indeed, the vast majority of those engaged in 2pro-Palestinian protests join progressive Jews in combating all forms of racism, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.
At the conclusion of his book, Beinart notes that being Jewish means liberating himself and his fellow Jews from the logic of racial supremacy in order to partner with Palestinians. This is a significant assertion, and one which strikes at the heart of far too much of contemporary Jewish consciousness. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is at its core a profound indictment of Zionism itself. It’s a call for Jews to return to a longer tradition of social justice and a universal ethical principle of dignity for all people. Doing so, Beinart argues, requires repudiating the racism that is embedded in the entire foundation and practices of Israeli history.
This is not an easy task for any Jew who grew up believing in Israel as a beacon of Jewish culture and of Jewish safety and refuge, even a deeply flawed and imperfect one. It is also probably easier for the millions of Jews who, like Beinart and myself, are not religiously observant. The destruction of Gaza and the genocide of its people has forced me to rethink my own views: I now see Israel as a rogue and criminal state, akin to apartheid South Africa, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, and the like. Likewise, I now totally support boycott, divest, and sanction efforts against Israel, despite some of my previous ambivalence.
But while I no longer care if Israel survives as a Jewish state per se, I still care profoundly about the lives and wellbeing of the many Jews living there. I have visited Israel in the past, have purchased various Israeli products, and enjoyed my relationship with some Israeli friends. I will continue to pursue the latter, however fraught.
I have no idea whether Beinart has managed to repair the tensions with the former friend to whom he addresses his note at the beginning of the book. In my own life, I intend to express my anti-Zionist views forcefully, regardless of the personal consequences. The time has long passed for walking on eggshells around supporters of Israeli racism and genocide, Jewish or not. I’ll tell my own vision of the truth, and I’ll live with the consequences. These are traumatic times, for Jews, for non-Jews, and for the world—and ones which will endure, I fear, for decades to come.