Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: Peter Beinart’s Suicidal Masterpiece

As a Jew whose larger family has been split by the events since October 7, 2023, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is extremely personal.

Al-Nasser Street, in Gaza City. Credit: NRC

by Rich Herschlag

Possibly the most valuable thing my dad ever taught me was the importance of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. It’s critical to understanding their thinking and allows the development of both strategy and empathy. Moreover, seeing the situation from another’s perspective is vital with either a friend or foe.

In Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza that’s all Peter Beinart is asking of the reader—a little perspective. From some of the reaction to the book one might think he was asking the reader to jump off a skyscraper sans parachute. As it turns out, for millions of people with a deep tribal historical grudge the freefall plunge is easier, hands down.

Beinart delivers a great deal in about 120 pages packed with history, morality, optimism, skepticism and, not least of all, facts. In 1947-8, roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from Palestine with—according to a 1948 report by Israeli intelligence—70 percent of the departures forced directly by Zionist military. Between one-third and one-half of those people were expelled before the May 14, 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence and subsequent military attack by several Arab governments. By that same date, the cities of Jaffa and Haifa were already largely depopulated.

The actions taken by Israeli forces were not the result of confusion or miscommunication but rather by design. In December 1947, a month after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab countries, Israel’s principal founder, David Ben-Gurion, remarked to fellow Zionists, “Only a state with at least 80 percent Jews is a viable and stable state.” How they reached that plateau from about one-third Jews was largely a trail of blood. In the coming months Zionist forces would depopulate, loot, and in some cases utterly destroy roughly 400 Palestinian villages.

For those readers who choose to go no further it is worth mentioning that Beinart’s relatively short work is annotated meticulously with 45 pages of footnotes in a font half the size of the narrative text. While some of the book’s preliminaries were familiar to me and some were not, they’re all backed up for anyone who cares to look under the hood, and for those with some extra time on their hands it’s not a bad idea. But with this factual and, especially for distraught readers like myself, disturbing basis, the remainder of Beinart’s treatise demands an uncomfortable and awful reckoning of the mind, heart, and conscience.

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Beinart is unflinching at every level and personally assumes culpability for any unpleasant notion he dishes out to fellow Jews. The book opens with a letter to one such fellow Jew, a former friend due to the October 7 Hamas attack fallout, with Beinart not simply apologizing for presenting a viewpoint so unpalatable to so many members of the Jewish community, but even extolling his friend for the very fervency that has driven the two apart. As the author sees it, the same single-mindedness that demonizes Beinart today is likely that which allowed his ancestors to survive under attack. With Jewish ancestral roots in Egypt, Russia, and Lithuania, Beinart acknowledges it has been people like his former friend who literally provided a bridge to the next generation of Jews from whatever purge, pogrom, persecution, or Holocaust they have undergone to wherever and however they ultimately sought refuge. Underpinning that duality—introspective versus hardline—is an eternal strength of the Jewish people, the ability to see, reason and argue both sides of the same coin. Upon this duality and this underpinning rest his hopes that one day, perhaps even in the World to Come, Beinart will regain both his friend and his people. This same optimism informs and shapes the remainder of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

Though Beinart works overtime to maintain some sort of balance between acknowledging the epic injustices to his people and the repeated paying forward of many of those very same injustices to the Palestinians, both the author himself and virtually any armchair observer of the longstanding conflict anticipate Jewish disgust and accusations of “traitor” or of “self-hating Jew.” For this visceral reaction Beinart offers no false consolations, only truth piled upon truth and a wistful willingness to serve as a pariah. As of the book’s writing, 6 percent of Gaza’s population had been killed by Netanyahu’s military—the proportional equivalent of about 500,000 Israelis or 18 million Americans. The death toll in Gaza includes thousands of children, thousands of fatalities by starvation, and countless instances of fates too gruesome for the much of the legacy media.

It is in underscoring these unspeakable numbers and clearly triggering comparisons to the Holocaust that Beinart doubles down morally, ethically, and demonstratively and thereby likely seals his fate as “enemy” of his own people. His discussion of the often distorted, convenient, and historically inaccurate Jewish self-narrative of a people as victims always and oppressors never has and will probably continue indefinitely to strike the rawest nerve. Beinart doesn’t merely walk up to the taboo line. He crosses it, as when he equates worship of the State of Israel with the worst sin described in the Torah—idolatry.

The logical destination of these pages—assuming you accept the premises—is both implied and finally asked outright. How many Palestinians would Israel have to kill in Gaza before you urged the United States to stop sending it weapons? How many human rights groups have to accuse it of apartheid before you question the principle that Jews alone must rule? Beinart anticipates a nearly unanimous dismissal of both these questions and others like them by supporters of Israel’s recent military actions. Yet the true core of this book—which is as practical as it is scathing—is laid out succinctly on page 68. Israel doesn’t have a Hamas problem. It has a Palestinian problem . . . Which means it’s foolish to think that Israel grows safer when it reduces Gaza to rubble.

The answer to Beinart’s central proposition, to borrow from Bob Dylan, is blowing in a wind filled with concrete debris and burned human flesh. Even if you disagree with Beinart’s assessment of his people’s shortcomings, in this myopic, self-indulgent age simply asking the question is an act of sheer courage and career suicide.

I’m less than sure of my own courage. As a Jew whose larger family has been split by the events since October 7, 2023, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is extremely personal. Last year my younger adult daughter—a highly evolved environmentalist, moralist, pacifist and onetime studious bat mitzvah girl—reposted a simple meme in support of fallen Palestinian civilians. She was met with a long, ranting accusatory diatribe in which her second cousin—the wife of a reservist in Israel’s military—disavowed their relationship and familial ties till Olam Ha’Ba, all of time. That screed was quickly followed by a longer one directly to me from my first cousin—mother of one feuding cousin to father of the other—essentially ordering me to bend my 26-year-old Phi Beta Kappa kid over my knee and set her straight.

For many months I’ve been getting exaggerated posts from friends about the instant violent death that awaits any Jewish student who dares set foot on the campuses of a long list of American universities whose “elitism” and “anti-Semitism” are apparently established by whether they’ve enrolled at least one student willing to protest the slaughter of innocent Palestinians. I’ve read cavalier dismissals of the slaughter by everyone from utter ignoramuses to celebrated scholars and pundits. And I’ve responded to almost none of it. Because I’m well aware that for countless Jews the required equating of moral, ethical, and spiritual Judaism with blind support for whoever at the moment controls the razor thin majority in the Israeli Knesset is unthinking, unforgiving, and nearly absolute. And apparently unlike Peter Beinart I’m tired, not that optimistic, and just don’t want to deal with it.

Where I usually end up after a one-way assault on my loyalty and intelligence is quietly seething and dwelling on a simple notion—my lifelong intimate familiarity with these self-assured mishpucha regarding a single character trait. Had they for some reason been born to a Gaza family whom they watched perish horribly at the hands of the Israeli military, they would spend the remainder of their natural lives swearing vengeance. The same is true for me. My father taught me at least to admit it.

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