Peter Beinart’s Dilemma How does a Jewish writer who hates Israel address October 7? by Bruce Bawer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/peter-beinarts-dilemma/
Now 54, the American Jewish writer Peter Beinart, author of the new book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza, is one of the most prominent of those lamentably multitudinous commentators in whose view Israel can hardly do anything right and the Palestinians can hardly do anything wrong. Asked about Palestinian violence, he’s been quick to blame it on Israel. While wringing his hands incessantly over Muslim suffering, he’s displayed a chilling indifference to the plight of Jews in Iran. He’s even routinely refused to identify Islamic terrorist atrocities in Europe and elsewhere as acts of jihad, or to concede that there’s anything at all about Islam and its teachings that should cause concern to Westerners who live alongside the religion’s adherents.
Long a champion of the two-state solution, in 2020 Beinart wrote a New York Times op-ed announcing a change of heart. Whereas “the dream of a two-state solution that would give Palestinians a country of their own” had once let him hope that he “could remain a liberal and a supporter of Jewish statehood at the same time,” that hope had been “extinguished” by Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank and the denial of “basic rights” to its inhabitants. Hence the time had come “to abandon the traditional two-state solution” and “imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state” – which could mean “one state that includes Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem” or “a confederation that allows free movement between two deeply integrated countries.” Yes, admitted Beinart, some Palestinians had committed terrorist acts against Israeli Jews, but after all “members of many oppressed groups” had done the same. (For Beinart, Muslim terror is always a desperate reaction to Western oppression, never part of a coldblooded, Koran-inspired effort to expand the umma.) Dismissing Jewish concerns “that anything short of Jewish statehood would mean Jewish suicide,” Beinart quoted an Orthodox rabbi who’d “spent more than a decade forging relationships with leaders of Hamas” as saying: “I have yet to meet with somebody who is not willing to make peace.” Well, that op-ed certainly didn’t age well.
If most of Beinart’s pro-Israeli readers have long considered him to be a pretty appalling piece of work, after October 7, 2023, it’s hard not to see him as something considerably more unsavory and problematic: at best, a mischief-maker on a colossal scale, who actively encouraged the credulity that made October 7 possible; at worst, a friend and supporter of the monsters who butchered his own people. Which, I suppose, is why the opening pages of his new book amount to a charm offensive designed to convince the reader that he’s a good, decent soul who wants nothing but the best for all parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First there’s the dedication to his late grandmother, who “disagreed with the arguments in this book” but whose “spirit is on every page.” (Frankly, I think this is a shabby way to exploit one’s grandmother.) Then there’s the epigraph from the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “Judaism is about the university of justice but the particularity of love.” (I suspect that Sacks, like Beinart’s grandmother, wouldn’t appreciate being used this way.) This is followed by the prefatory “Note to a Former Friend,” which begins: “I think about you often, and about the argument that has divided us.” He goes on like that for a few paragraphs, presenting himself as deeply sensitive: “When I enter a synagogue, I no longer know who will extend their hand and who will turn away.” But eventually he lays his cards on the table, establishing the book’s theme:
I consider your single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral and self-defeating. It justifies actions that I consider grave crimes. It blinds you to the essential interconnectedness of Jewish and Palestinian safety. When I hear you thunder about the Israelis murdered and captured on October 7, I wish you would summon some of that righteous anger for the Palestinians slaughtered in even greater numbers. That’s why I titled this book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, not Being Jewish After October 7. It’s not because I minimize that day. Like you, I remain shaken by its horror. I chose the former as a title because I know you grapple with the terror of that day. I worry that you don’t grapple sufficiently with the terror of the days that followed, and preceded it, as well.
And that’s not the end of the front matter. There’s also a prologue entitled “We Need a New Story.” He proceeds to provide us with one. It begins with his childhood in apartheid-era South Africa, where the members of his extended family were very preoccupied with their Jewish identity, which made them feel close to Jews everywhere. Yet they didn’t feel at all close to the black people who worked in their own homes. Why? Because they were convinced that their servants would “kill us if they could” and that somewhere a “Black terror army was plotting to do just that.” But eventually apartheid ended, and South African whites have had it fine ever since. Really? Which South Africa is Beinart talking about here? As Daniel Greenfield put it recently, post-apartheid South Africa is “a corrupt racist dictatorship” where the ruling African National Congress destroyed the economy, turning “a first-world country” into “a place where the power can’t be expected to stay on in its major cities.” And now the ANC is confiscating white people’s land, in response to which President Trump has threatened to cut off aid.
But of course Beinart’s book isn’t about South Africa. It’s about Israel, where, as in apartheid-era South Africa, he maintains, Jews feel the kind of attachment to the country that people feel to the house they live in – except in both countries, or houses, “other people lived there before the house was even built.” Those “other people,” writes Beinart, have for a long time been “crowded into cramped, squalid rooms,” and many of them are now “malnourished” and “screaming in pain.” But, in post-October 7 Israel as in apartheid-era South Africa, those other people “want us dead,” so we have “no choice” other than to harm them.
Beinart’s paragraphs on South Africa are illuminating. I never really understood his intense animus toward Israel; I now see that he views the Israeli-Palestinian situation entirely through the prism of his youth in an extended South African Jewish family whose members regarded all the blacks around them with fear and loathing. For Beinart, Israeli Jews are his extended family writ large. One problem with this formulation is that it omits from the picture the many white South Africans (the names of authors like Mary Renault, Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton, J.M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, and André Brink come to mind) who vigorously opposed apartheid. Another reason why it’s absurd to draw a facile parallel between South African blacks and Palestinian Muslims is that the former are united by race, while the latter are united by adherence to a supremacist ideology of violent conquest – a fact that Beinart dances around throughout this book with the nimbleness of a Fred Astaire.
Indeed, Beinart would have you believe that it’s the Jews who are united by a supremacist, violent ideology. By way of elucidating his concept of the Jewish self-image, he recalls the story of Purim, told in the Book of Esther, which famously records an episode in which the Hebrews, after being victimized, killed 75,000 gentiles in retribution. This story, contends Beinart, amounts to a fantasy of Jewish power that was embraced over the generations by a people who were, in point of fact, powerless, and who preferred to fixate on Jewish victimhood and revenge rather than on “Jewish ethical responsibility” – a failing that, in his view, accounts for Israel’s response to October 7. Later, citing the account in the Book of Joshua of how the Hebrews conquered Canaan, Beinart maintains that the early Zionists loved this account because they saw that conquest as a precursor to their own resettlement of the same land.
Eventually Beinart takes a deep dive into recent events. Rushing past the October 7 attacks, he recounts the ensuing Israeli military actions in unsympathetic detail. He objects to the widespread comparison of the October 7 terrorists to Nazis on the grounds that the Jews killed on that day were not “members of a vulnerable minority living in countries that had long restricted their rights”; no, this time around it wasn’t the Jews but the Palestinians who were a vulnerable minority who’d been denied their rights. Instead of the Holocaust, Beinart suggests, October 7 should be likened to the anti-white violence of the 1804 Haitian Revolution, the 1813 extermination by Creek Indians of white settlers in Alabama, or the 1953 massacre of British colonials in Kenya by Mau Mau rebels. In other words, October 7 was not one more historical example of Jews being murdered for being Jews; it was one more example of Western imperialist tyrants getting their just desserts – if unpleasantly so – for being imperialist tyrants. Some of us might perceive a link between October 7 and the terrorist acts at the Boston Marathon, at the Manchester Arena, at Madrid’s Atocha train station, at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, at the school in Beslan, Russia, on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, on London Bridge, and at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Not Beinart.
On it goes. You’d never know from Beinart’s take on the Oslo Accords that Yasir Arafat was a world-scale kleptocrat who loved killing Jews and never wanted peace or a Palestinian state. You’d never know that Gazan authorities have received more foreign aid than the government of any place of comparable size on earth – and have done the least good with it, using it not to feed, clothe, and house their people, let alone develop Gaza into a new Dubai or Singapore, but to buy armaments and build terrorist tunnels. Beinart criticizes Israelis for not taking Hamas’s statistics at face value – even as he himself ridicules Israeli statements at every turn. He mentions Israel’s destruction of hospitals in Gaza but omits to mention that Hamas was storing munitions in them and using them as bases from which to launch attacks. In an attempt to defend the Gazans against the charge that it was they, after all, who put Hamas into power, Beinart lamely points out that the inhabitants of the West Bank, too, voted in the 2006 election, and that Hamas received “only” 46 percent of the vote. (Yes – and Fatah got almost all of the rest, indicating a stupendously high degree of support for terrorism by Muslims both in Gaza and on the West Bank).
There’s still more. Beinart argues that contemporary Jewish definitions of antisemitism have been invented out of whole cloth in order to dismiss legitimate criticism of Israel. (To him, there’s nothing bizarre about the fact that the UN focuses obsessively on purported Israeli human-rights violations even as it overlooks crimes committed by Communist dictatorships, Muslims sharia states, and other tyrannies.) Beinart claims that in the U.S. and Europe, real antisemitism is still the province of the right, not the left. (The left’s condemnations of Israel, you see, are rooted in legitimate concerns about Israeli racism and injustice.) He identifies the GOP, France’s National Rally, and the Alliance for Germany, all known for their strong support of Israel, as “authoritarian right-wing parties.” He rejects assertions that the Palestinians are more antisemitic, or more bigoted generally, than other people. And he accuses Zionists of blasphemously “[t]reating a state as a god.”
How to sum up Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza? It’s a tough book to read. One sentence after another is a malicious, morally reprehensible distortion of – or utter avoidance of – the truth. To be honest, spending a few hours inside the mind of an anti-Zionist Jew who, after October 7, instead of confessing error and begging forgiveness, has chosen to double down on his perfidy, feels like latrine duty. And Beinart’s delusional concluding thoughts render one speechless. If Jews, he preaches, wish “to bless humanity in our time,” they must do the hard work of “liberating ourselves from supremacy so, as partners with Palestinians, we can help liberate the world.” This kind of language always sounded defiantly, determinedly, and dangerously divorced from reality, but after October 7 what stands out is the utter lack of fundamental decency. But what is a psychopathic narcissist to do in the wake of a horrific world-historical event that has proved his own assumptions about absolutely everything to be spectacularly wrong?
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