Q. & A. with Peter Beinart: What Did the War in Gaza Reveal About American Judaism?

In a new book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” Peter Beinart argues that many American Jews who defend Israel have lost their moral bearings. He makes the case, in a series of linked essays, that Jews in America and around the world should push for a single state comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories which grants everyone equal rights. “This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams,” Beinart writes. “It’s about the story that enables our leaders, our families, and our friends to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip—­the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name—­and shrug, if not applaud.”

I recently spoke by phone with Beinart, whom I met almost twenty years ago when I went to work for The New Republic. He had just stepped down from a tenure editing the magazine, during which it endorsed both the Iraq War and Joe Lieberman’s lethargic 2004 Presidential campaign. After stepping down, Beinart renounced his support for the war and started focussing more on issues having to do with Israel and American Jewry. (His current newsletter is called “The Beinart Notebook.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what he misjudged about the U.S.’s unwillingness to change its relationship to Israel, whether a one-state solution is really a more likely alternative than two states living side by side, and how debates over Israel have warped conversations about antisemitism in America.

There was hope about a decade ago among people like yourself that American Jews—especially younger ones—were moving away from ironclad support for Israel. Do you feel surprised or disappointed by the degree to which the United States, and even the Democratic Party, seems to have not moved in that direction after October 7th?

I think I probably underestimated the degree to which, even inside the Democratic Party, politicians could remain unresponsive to shifts in public opinion, because they don’t really face much of a cost. There are other forces that just matter more than public opinion.

Which are?

Well, the role of money in politics is a really, really big one. And I think that was especially true for Joe Biden, because he didn’t have the capacity to raise money from the public at large. He wasn’t a Bernie Sanders or a Barack Obama who could raise large amounts of money from small donations. It’s also a problem for members of Congress. Except for a small handful of celebrity members, they are not national figures who can raise enough money that they can compete with an organization like AIPAC if AIPAC decides to target them.

But I think there is a danger in focussing too exclusively on money. Money plays a role in this, but there’s also a deep way in which the Israeli story is one that’s very resonant to many Americans, because it’s so similar to the American story. It’s a promised land forged on a hostile frontier. And the more invested you are in America’s own founding myth, the more you’re going to find Israel’s founding myth appealing. I think a lot of people in the Republican Party, even if there was no campaign financing at stake, find this narrative very, very powerful. And Israel, in some ways, is a vision of what they would like America to be, which is a country that’s more nationalistic, more militaristic, has stronger border protection, and has clear hierarchies based on ethnicity and religion.

As Edward Said famously said, Palestinians still lack permission to narrate. Their story is in some ways a threatening story to America’s founding myth. When you start using phrases like “settler colonialism,” it doesn’t take much for Americans, especially white Americans, to get uncomfortable. And beyond that, October 7th was a horror. It was a horrifying event. And so there was a natural desire to express sympathy and solidarity with Israeli Jews in this moment of incredible trauma. And then the Israeli government says, “O.K., you want to show you care about Israeli Jews? Then support us in destroying the Gaza Strip.” It was a little bit like a post-9/11 moment, when it was very difficult in the public discourse to distinguish between the act of horror—what had happened, and empathy for the victims—and a policy response, which was just disastrous.

Why was the Biden Administration so unwilling to really do anything to sanction Israel or to try to stop its behavior?

If you come up in Washington politics and policy circles, you become accustomed to a template for how you deal with Israel. And that template is generally to avoid public fights, because those are not going to go well for you. And I think the people in the Biden Administration remember the Obama Administration. I will never forget the moment when, after Obama basically gave a speech about how there should be a Palestinian state near 1967 lines, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader of the Senate, went before AIPAC and threw Obama under the bus.

If you’re in Washington for a long time, you almost turn off a part of your brain when it comes to the question of Israel and Palestine. You just take the safest political route and you block out some of your human responses to what actually happens to Palestinians. You just become so accustomed to basically just looking away and rationalizing and not doing anything. I think folks in the Biden Administration underestimated the degree to which ordinary progressive Americans who had not undergone that kind of acculturation would simply look at what was happening in the age of social media and say, What the fuck? Why are we supporting this? And they underestimated the degree to which Gaza mattered for American progressives.

One of the things you say in your book is that many American Jews responded differently to this war than they would have if any other country had done what Israel did to Gaza. How do you understand that now?

Well, for most American Jews, it’s not just another country, right? It’s a country that we have been raised to see as deeply, intimately, connected to us, as a central part of our story—our story of genocide and survival and rebirth. And it’s a story of pride and safety. The Jewish tradition has this kind of metaphor of family running through it, this kind of imagined family. Imagine if you start getting pieces of evidence that members of your family are doing terrible, terrible things, right? That’s very painful to acknowledge. Plus, you recognize that generally people in a family don’t take kindly to those members of the family who start saying, “Hey, we’re doing horrible things.”

And this leads to the way the organized American Jewish community really functions. Whatever Israel does, they come up with some post-hoc justification. “It’s Hamas’s fault because it’s using human shields. It’s the people in Gaza’s fault because they voted for Hamas. The numbers are a lie—you can’t trust them.”

What have you made of the response both here and in Israel to President Trump proposing that Palestinians be forcefully kicked out of Gaza and sent to Egypt and Jordan?

I think for Trump it’s an example of his naked imperialism, where America should take territory for itself and he should personally profit. But within Israel and the American-Jewish community it confirmed my worst nightmare, which is that there was no independent moral standard that could be established vis-à-vis Israel. That whatever Israel did, there would be a post-hoc justification. Look at the statement from the American Jewish Committee. They say this is “concerning” but the statement is incredibly weak and otherwise lauds Trump. The Anti-Defamation League statement was also very weak.