‘We don’t really have any moral red lines’: Peter Beinart’s quest to disrupt Jews’ relationship to Israel
Beinart’s new book takes American Jews to task for their silence in the face of Gaza’s destruction
Peter Beinart has some questions — and some warnings — for American Jews. Photo by Joe Mabel/Courtesy of Knopf
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman February 13, 2025
Peter Beinart is well aware that American and Israeli Jews find what he has to say deeply uncomfortable.
In a phone call, I told Beinart that his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, is an effort to disrupt the often-automatic thought patterns and reactions of American Jews about Israel.
“People may think I’m profoundly wrong,” said Beinart, a former Forward columnist who is now editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, “but everything I do is based on my belief about what’s best for our people. And so if people don’t like that and don’t like those conclusions it leads me to, then, I’m sorry.”
Sorry, not sorry is more like it. In the book’s few short chapters, Beinart, who is Orthodox, asserts that the Jewish narrative of “eternal victimhood” has enabled us to avoid feeling a sense of responsibility for the deaths of innocents in Gaza and the hellscape that the Israeli army has left behind. This kneejerk denial ultimately harms Israel itself, he argues, because Israeli Jews can’t have security until Palestinians have equality.
The following conversation, about how Jews might respond to Beinart’s message, the consequences of President Donald Trump’s recent proposals for Gaza, and what he wants to see happen in the Middle East going forward, has been edited for length and clarity.
In my reporting in Israel after Oct. 7, I met many former leftists living on the Gaza border who for completely understandable reasons no longer want to hear about equality or reconciliation. How do you bridge that gap?
It’s a very understandable human response, right? But I think it’s important to distinguish what is an understandable human response and what is a wise response, or the response that’s likely to create greater safety. We could also say that the Palestinians in Gaza, whose territory has been now laid waste, may also not be in the mood to talk about equal coexistence, given the incredible trauma they suffered, right? That might be understandably the human response, but I don’t think it would be the right response.
Maybe it’s just too soon for Israelis? In your book, you quote the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi saying, essentially, if the world doesn’t like Israel’s response, tough. But he said that just weeks after Oct. 7. He now says Israelis will have to come to grips with the misery in Gaza.
I hope you are right. I don’t see really much evidence of that at all.
What I see is that once Trump suggests an act of mass ethnic cleansing, I don’t see moral revulsion from the Israeli political mainstream, nor from the American Jewish mainstream. And to me, this is symptomatic of what happens when we don’t really have any moral red lines when it comes to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
In the book, you claim that lack of red lines is due to Jews having a narrative of victimhood in which we couldn’t possibly be the perpetrators. That can lead, you write, to Jews not seeing Palestinians as anything but kind of stick figures.
The norm is that Palestinians don’t speak inside Jewish institutions. They’re not spoken about, they’re not humanized. That was true before Oct. 7, but the level of trauma and fear from Oct. 7 is unlike anything we’ve seen. So what happens is a discussion that refuses to engage with the context of the conditions that people were living under in Gaza, and becomes a kind of discourse of Palestinian savagery, which then lays the foundation for even greater violence against Palestinians, which I think ultimately creates greater danger for Israeli Jews.
When I hear “context” I immediately think “justification.”
That’s what I think is such bullshit. If you can’t distinguish between context and justification, you can’t make good political decisions, whether it’s about 9/11 or Oct. 7.
But your critics have a different context. They point out that Hamas has agency, and it spent its money on tunnels and rockets.
That narrative doesn’t grapple with what happened when Palestinians did the things that we are telling them to do. Palestinians have tried nonviolence. It’s not as if when Palestinians respond with nonviolence, they’re met with applause in Israel or American Jewish circles.
The Palestinian Authority did put down its arms. It actively collaborated with the Israeli government to ensure that there wouldn’t be any armed resistance. They had Salam Fayyad as prime minister for a number of years, who everyone thought was the most moderate Palestinian you could possibly imagine. And when he left politics, he said, “I got nothing from Israel. I couldn’t stop settlements for a single day. I was delegitimized, and Hamas is going to get stronger.”
I fundamentally oppose violence against civilians, period. But if you want Palestinians not to do that, you have to support some avenues that give Palestinians a chance for having basic human rights.
In your book, you heavily criticize American Jewish groups and U.S. colleges for cracking down on anti-Israel protesters. But when it comes to protesters who intimidate Jewish students or conflate all Jews with Israel, you say simply that you “wish” they wouldn’t. How do you want to see Jews and Jewish groups handle anti-Israel campus protests that do cross the line?
People have the right to speak. They don’t have the right to intimidate and harass. Students are not supposed to be protected on campuses from speech that they find upsetting. They’re supposed to be protected from physical attacks and intimidation and harassment.
We should have a single standard. If you are upset about the phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” why would you not also be upset that, actually, Israel controls from the river to the sea, which is not hypothetical? It holds millions of Palestinians under military law, has been called an apartheid state by its own leading human rights organizations, and has now basically destroyed most of the hospitals, schools, agriculture and buildings in Gaza. It’s a very bizarre double standard.
We just heard Trump’s vision of the future of Gaza. What’s yours? What do you want?
I would like the growth of a movement in the United States and around the world for Palestinian liberation which also speaks about that as Jewish liberation. In the way that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela recognized that the liberation of Black people from oppression would also be a kind of spiritual and moral liberation for their oppressor.
I would like the American Jewish community to stop being an obstacle to that movement. I would like more and more American Jews to join that effort and be a part of it. There are signs, especially among younger people, that a significant number of people are doing that, even though they often pay a real social cost inside their communities and their families.
Even if American Jews move in that direction, what about Israeli Jews? And can you blame them, considering what they’ve gone through?
I would never want to diminish in any way the trauma that Israeli Jews experienced on Oct. 7, and continue to experience. But that doesn’t mean that I have to defend a system of legal supremacy that denies basic freedoms to a whole set of human beings, because I think that’s immoral. It violates my understanding of Judaism’s best traditions, and I ultimately think it’s dangerous for Israeli Jews.
So my hope would be that a kind of loving pressure that builds among Palestinians and among their supporters around the world can help Israeli Jews look differently about questions of whether what they’re doing is just, and rethink what they’re what actually keeps them safe.
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