What It Means to be Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, now as we’ve been discussing, there is much uncertainty about the second phase of the ceasefire in Gaza. After nearly 16 months of war, the humanitarian situation there remains dire. Author and journalist Peter Beinart believes equality between Israelis and Palestinians is the only way to secure peace and safety for good. It’s something he addresses in his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and he joins Michelle Martin to discuss.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Peter Beinart, thank you so much for talking with us once again.

PETER BEINART, AUTHOR, “BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA”: Thank you.

MARTIN: You open your latest book with what you call a letter to a former friend. It’s heartbreaking. Will you just tell us about this letter and why is this a former friend?

BEINART: So, this — my public views of opposition to the war in Gaza and opposition to the idea of a state that gives Jews rights that Palestinians don’t have is a very, very unpopular view in certain elements of the American Jewish community and many of the places — institutions in which I spend my life because I’m an observant Jew. And so, Jewish institutions are structure my life. And in those institutions, there are many people who I care about a great deal who feel very betrayed by my views, especially because they’re expressed so publicly. And people said many times, you know, Peter, I feel like you are putting my family at risk. And so, I wanted to write this book for those people to try to explain why I see things so differently, why I feel like our organized community has gone so profoundly wrong, and why that I believe that what we’re doing and what we’re supporting in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Israel’s destruction of Gaza is not just a violation of our best ethical and religious traditions, but ultimately endangers us.

MARTIN: This latest book is titled “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.” It’s not being Jewish after October 7th. It’s not being Jewish after 1947. Why after the destruction of Gaza? Why do — why is that the beginning point?

BEINART: Because I think that the Jewish community feels and wrestles with the horror of October 7th that we — that’s for all of us omnipresent. I’m dooting (ph) for myself, one of the most traumatic days of my life. I know people are already wrestling with the horror of that. But what led me to write this book was seeing so many good and decent people that I know who day after day after day somehow seem to be able to block out the screens of what was happening in Gaza. Like I was looking at my computer screen every day and also hearing from people who have family in Gaza, and every day I was thinking, I can’t believe that this is happening, right? The — most of the buildings are being destroyed, most of the schools, most of the hospitals, most of the agriculture, the number of children who’ve been killed just dwarfs what we’ve seen in Ukraine or almost any conflict of the 21st century, more child amputees than any other place in modern history. And I look at my community that I love, and I see that people are justifying this. Maybe they’re saying it’s unfortunate, but they’re also saying it’s necessary. And to me, that reflects an unwillingness to truly face what is being done in our name as Jews.

MARTIN: How did this understanding start for you? Because you have a reputation as a person who has long been concerned about Israel’s role in the world, the way it manages its governance, of its territories, and the story it tells the world about itself.

BEINART: I was raised in a family where Israel was very, very important, you know, as a sense of security, that there that there was a state for Jews after the Holocaust. My father, my grandfather, I remember how much they love to be in Israel. When I started going to Israel as a kid, I also loved being there. You know, when you’re used to being this really small minority and then you grow into — go to like a Jewish civilization where everything you see reflects your identity and your culture, it’s a very powerful experience. But I had no experience with what all this meant for Palestinians. That was completely off of my radar screen. It wasn’t until my 30s. I’m embarrassed to say so late in my life that I first went to spend time with Palestinians in the West Bank to see what Israel meant for them. And on the first day, I thought, oh, my goodness, I’m going to have to rethink some things, that I had no idea what it really meant for people to live under the control of a state where they had no rights, where they couldn’t become citizens, where they couldn’t vote, where they lived under military law, where they needed military permission to travel. And it was that experience with Palestinians that made me rethink what it means to me to try to live ethically as a Jew.

MARTIN: Do you remember what it is that you saw, literally, on those first days that awakened this, I don’t know any other way to call it, but a moral crisis in you?

BEINART: Yes. I remember talking to a woman. I write about it in the book. And she had two daughter, and then they had a son. And then when she had a — her daughters heard that she had a son, the daughter started crying hysterically, because in their village, the boys would throw stones at Israeli soldiers, and the Israeli army would then go in the middle of the night and pull the boys out of their homes. They didn’t necessarily knew who threw the stones, but they knew that probably that boy could inform on the other boys, even if it wasn’t him. And then, they would hold them in — you know, and you can — because they live under military law, you can be held under indefinite detention without family, without a lawyer, often physically harmed for days. And I saw that fear and it made me realize, what does it mean to live under the control of a state that has life and death power over you, but is not accountable to you at all? You can’t vote. You don’t live under the same law as your Jewish neighbors. It’s a terrifying experience to be powerless vis-a-vis state that has control over you. And I had never really internalized that. I’d never imagined — been able to imagine myself in that place.

MARTIN: Yes. Interestingly you were actually from South Africa, your family is from South Africa. And I just wonder how, you know —

BEINART: Yes.

MARTIN: — what role that played in your understanding of these things.

BEINART: What happened is, after I started to learn from Palestinians and read Palestinian writing and get an understanding of what Israel had meant for Palestinians, I started to hear echoes of what I heard white South Africans say during apartheid. Because white South Africans almost universally were convinced that if black people got the right to vote, that their lives would be in grave danger. It was considered just obvious that basically apartheid was what kept white people safe. Because, you know, Nelson Mandela did not believe in nonviolence. The African National Congress used armed resistance. They were called a terrorist organization by the United States government. They were being funded by the Soviet Union. It looked terrifying to white people. And so, I kept thinking, why were all of those white South Africans, including people in my own family, why were they wrong? Why actually were white people not slaughtered? Why did the ANC’s military wing disband after the end of apartheid? And the reason I think is that it wasn’t necessary anymore because when people have the right to vote, when they can get the government to listen to them without having to take up arms, most people are much, much happier doing that than having to put their lives at risk, which is why when you give people equality under the law, things become safer. And so, that began to transform the way I heard these debates in the Jewish community, where people always say, unless we have a state in which we have legal superiority, we can’t be safe.

MARTIN: Really, this book is directed toward Jewish people, really. I mean — and so, I want to start — I want to talk about what you call the story that Jewish people tell themselves about being history’s permanent, virtuous victims. What do you mean by that?

BEINART: I mean that I think that oftentimes because of our extremely traumatic history, there is a tendency in Jewish discourse to imagine that the only role that we play vis-a-vis other people in the world is as the role — in the role of victims. So, after October 7th, the horror of October 7th, people immediately started calling it a pogrom, which was essentially referring to it as a kind of continuation of the assault on Jews in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, as if the Palestinians are the reincarnation of these anti-Semites from Europe a century ago, or indeed, even the reincarnation of the Nazis, right? But the conditions in Israel-Palestine are completely different. You can’t understand the violence against Jews in Europe without understanding that Jews were legally inferior. In Israel-Palestine it’s Palestinians who are legally inferior. Jews have legal supremacy over Palestinians. And so, if you want to understand this terrible act of violence by Hamas, you have to be willing to face the fact that Palestinians live without basic rights. And if you ignore that, you’re basically just suggesting that Palestinians are the reincarnation of the Jew haters of old. They are not people in and of themselves that you need to actually try to understand.

MARTIN: And you also say that — well, let’s just talk about something that is actually a very — it’s a very delicate thing to speak about in any circumstance. But many people do compare the atrocities of a Hamas attack on October 7th to the events of the Holocaust. And people, you know — talking about the Holocaust is always sort of very fraught, you know, no matter where you are, but you argue that this isn’t quite the right analogy to invoke. And why is that?

BEINART: Again, because you can’t understand the Holocaust without understanding the fact that Jews were Europe’s other, the subordinated class for centuries. October 7th is much more, in my mind, like an inhumane, brutal attack by people who are oppressed, right? And there are — this happens tragically throughout history. Think about America in the 19th century, when Native Americans had been forced off their land, crowded into smaller and smaller reservations. When they had the opportunity to fight back, oftentimes they didn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. They killed men, women, and children in horrifying ways, just like Hamas did in horrifying ways. Palestinians in Gaza — this doesn’t get discussed enough in the American media. Palestinians in Gaza are not from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees that were forced out of what’s now Israel. Many of them can see from Gaza their lands in which they live. Now, they live in a place that’s called an open-air prison by Human Rights Watch. My friend Mohammed Shahada (ph) told me that everyone he knew growing up in Gaza had contemplated suicide. There was — because there was no hope for them to have a decent life. In those — if you want to make sure that we never have October 7th again, God forbid, you have to deal with those — that underlying oppression, because when you inflict violence on people, the structural violence that Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, you ultimately make everybody less safe.

MARTIN: Peter, one of the points that you make in your book is that criticizing the way Israel conducts itself on the world stage and the way Israel conducts itself within Gaza and the West Bank is not the same as being anti-Semitic, OK? But you can acknowledge, can you not, that Hamas and Hezbollah are, that Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups have been or are anti-Semitic and want to kill Jews. So, how should we think about that?

BEINART: The way I think about it is that when people are denied their rights, they resist that oppression. And they do so in a range of ways. Some of which are ethical and humane, some of which are unethical and inhumane. Some of which — sometimes they do so in a spirit of equality and the recognition of the humanity of all people, and sometimes they do so in a kind of, in the case of Hezbollah and Hamas, in an Islamist ideology, which is itself supremacist, because it believes that there should be an Islamic State in which Muslims have rights that are superior to Christians and Jews. And so, it seems to me the right way to respond to this is if you want to weaken Hamas, if you want to defeat Hamas and Hezbollah, you have to support Palestinians who are fighting for their freedom in ways that are ethical, in ways that are consistent with international law, in ways that don’t target Israeli civilians. And when I look at what Israel and America have done, look at how they respond when Palestinians appeal nonviolently, when they try to go to the U.N. or to international courts, or when they call for boycotts or divestment and sanctions in the spirit of the anti-apartheid movement, or when they do nonviolent marches like the Great March of Return, or even when they collaborate with Israel in order to convince Israel that they can be trusted by working cooperatively with the Israeli military, as the Palestinian Authority does, Israel defeats all of those efforts. Palestinians have not gained anything from those ethical, nonviolent struggles. So, if we are horrified by October 7th and we oppose the ideology of Hamas and we don’t want a single Israeli Jew to die, we are incumbent, it seems to me, on us to support ethical, humane, nonviolent Palestinian resistance to show Palestinians that there’s a better way. And I fear that the United States government in Israel and the organized American Jewish community has done exactly the opposite.

MARTIN: Is it your view that more people share your view than are willing to express it publicly, particularly in the wake of October 7th?

BEINART: Yes.

MARTIN: I remember a conversation that I had with a young college student who is observant, like yourself, deeply observant, and said that in the wake of October 7th, she said to her parents, well, didn’t we want a place where we could be safe and free? Don’t Palestinians want the same thing? They want a place where they can be safe and free?

BEINART: Right.

MARTIN: And she told me that her parents said to her, now is not the time.

BEINART: Polling shows, actually — that particularly among younger American Jews, that a remarkably high percentage of young American Jews say things like they think Israel is an apartheid state. And there was a fascinating poll done by a Canadian political scientist, Mira Sucharov, where she asked American Jews if they consider themselves, would you consider yourself a Zionist, if Zionism means that Israeli Jews have more rights than Palestinians? Most American Jews said no. So, there are undoubtedly a lot of very passionate supporters of the State of Israel and of what is — and of this war. But there’s also a climate of fear that exists in the American Jewish community. Rabbis know that if you publicly criticize Israel too harshly, you very well lose your job, or if you’re a teacher at a Jewish school or a Jewish camp, people know this very well. And so, oftentimes people suppress what they say. Young American Jewish kids know this as well, that the consequences for them could be very severe. And so, I think that there’s much more division and much more diversity of opinion among American Jews than you might sometimes know, because sometimes people are afraid to express it.

MARTIN: One of the things that we haven’t talked about yet, though, that I do want to talk about is this whole question of who is indigenous, like who are the indigenous people, right?

BEINART: Yes, yes.

MARTIN: And, you know, one of the arguments that’s emerged is that it describes Israel as a settler colonial state. It sort of suggests that these are people who came from someplace else and planted themselves on the indigenous people, displaced them, killed them, oppressed them, et cetera. But then other people argue that Jews also have indigenous rights to this land. So, how do you think about that?

BEINART: I think both of these things can be true. Nobody needs to tell me that Jews have a deep and profound ancient spiritual connection to this place. When I woke up this morning, I prayed a liturgy which spoke about a desire to return to the land of Israel. It’s very, very deep within our tradition. But it’s also the case that the Zionist movement was created in the late 19th and early 20th century by Europeans who referred to themselves as colonists. Theodor Herzl writes to Cecil Rhodes, the arch imperialist of Southern Africa, and says, we have a colonial project here. It’s just like yours. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism, Netanyahu’s own tradition. Colonial was a positive term for them. It meant bringing modernity to a backward part of the world. And people say, wait a second, it can’t be settler colonial if people have deep roots in that place. Cornel West’s answer to that is to cite Liberia, right? The people who colonized Liberia were enslaved black Americans who had come from West Africa. They also had roots in that place, but when they went back to create a state in Liberia, they oppressed the native populations there because they also had notions of them as — of themselves as kind of coming from a superior society and wanting to rule. So, these two things can both be the case. And as you said, Jews have the right to live equally and safely in Israel- Palestine. I believe that very, very deeply. But that doesn’t mean you have the right to superiority over another people.

MARTIN: What is your vision for this land?

BEINART: Israel-Palestine is a binational society. You have two nations — two groups that both see themselves as nations, that both that speak a foreign language. That would have to be represented in government. So, it would might be a binational democracy. But the principle that I believe is that wherever Jews and Palestinians live alongside one another, they should be — they should live equally under the law. And I — my hope, I don’t know if I’ll ever see it, is that when we look at what happened in South Africa and we look at that South African legal team that went to the International Court of Justice and there were white people and black people and Indian people and people and of all different backgrounds, and they were saying, look at us. We overcame supremacy and we are now fighting to make — to fight for that principle around the world of human equality. That’s my dream of what we could have among Palestinians and Israelis. A legal team of Palestinian and Israeli Jews saying, we overcame of supremacy. We live together in equality and are what we accomplished can be now an inspiration for the world. And I really believe the world needs that inspiration today.

MARTIN: Peter Beinart, thank you so much for talking with us.

BEINART: Thank you.