What it means to be Jewish after the destruction of Gaza: 'There will be a certain amount of shame for the next generation'
Opinion by Berna González Harbour
• 21h
Peter Beinart on March 20 in New York, during a demonstration to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian detained by ICE.© Anadolu (Anadolu via Getty Images)
Uproar has been raised around the world against the cruelty wielded by the Israeli government against Palestinians, protests that took on new weight when they were organized by Jews themselves. Many were spearheaded by intellectuals like Peter Beinart (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 54 years old), who has employed his forceful analysis and thought toward opening a debate from which many in his community would rather shy. His latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, was published by Knopf last year. The title almost says it all.
“When I enter a synagogue, I am no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away,” confesses Beinart in the “Note To My Former Friend” that opens the book. He continues, “How does someone like me, who still considers himself a Jewish loyalist, end up being cursed on the street by people who believe Jewish loyalty requires my excommunication?” Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science, and a columnist for The New York Times and The Atlantic, in addition to being a contributor to other U.S. publications. He took part in the following interview by telephone from New York.
Question. Have you lost friends over your ideals? Over the book?
Answer. Yes of course, I’ve lost friendships and that is hard, but it is nothing in comparison with people’s suffering over the destruction of their homes, the loss of their families, and hunger. My opinions make it more difficult for me in my community, but that’s nothing compared to the problems of the Palestinians, of many Jews, and even Americans in the Trump era.
A U.S. Jew whose family is from South Africa, Beinart lays out a precise analogy of that country’s apartheid regime to argue against the actions of the Israeli government. The stories and legends he heard in his youth spoke of a security — that of the whites — that required supremacy to survive. Protecting onself required subjugating the rest.
What we are now seeing, he says, has “a parallel with the entire supremacist political system that bestows a racial or religious group with superior rights over the rest. You had it in South Africa with apartheid, in the United States with segregation and in Northern Ireland,” he says. “People get used to these systems, and tend to see legal equality as a major threat.” White South Africans saw themselves as being vulnerable to the African National Congress, perceiving its armed movement as an attack against them, and believed that apartheid protected them. “What I attempt in the book is to see what is wrong within that logic. When you give people the right to vote, to move, to be citizens, violence decreases because now there is a non-violent way through which the state can hear them.”
That’s why Beinart argues that Israeli Jews would be safer if they respected human rights. “It is the violence of the oppression that generates counterviolence. The freedom of Palestinians would not only make them safer, but also, Israeli Jews. I know that this is interpreted as a violation of solidarity with other Jewish people, and that is hard, but I believe in speaking in the better interest of both Jews and Palestinians.”
Q. Is it harder to be a Jew today, after the destruction of Gaza?
A. Jewish tradition and identity have been utilized to commit terrible crimes against Palestinians, and that is a moral and spiritual challenge that we must now confront as Jewish people.
His book describes the eternal tendency of the Jews to see themselves as victims, the result of a history of antisemitism and brutal attacks that found their maximum expression in the Nazi genocide. “This tendency is the result of a long history of Jewish victimization, but it is also a way of eluding responsibility for what Israel is doing to the Palestinians.” The way that Jews represent themselves, he says, is as a people destined by history to perpetually face their own annihilation, and to miraculously survive. That selective viewpoint excludes the fact that “our ancestors were slaves and slaveholders too,” as Beinart writes in the book. And so it continues, despite the establishment of a Jewish state.
And what of antisemitism, the concept to which the Israeli government is forever attributing any criticism of its actions in Gaza? Are we in danger of undermining the severity of its meaning? “Yes,” he responds, “that cheapens the concept and allows you to look away and change the subject completely.” He continues that, “The Jewish people have suffered immensely from anti-semitism for centuries due to anti-Jewish fanaticism. We now have the responsibility to recognize this sacred inheritance of our ancestors, and we shouldn’t cheapen it by trading on the moral capital of what was done to them in order to silence, intimidate, or stop legitimate arguments against a war that they cannot ethically defend,” he says.
Beinart feels that many Jews are failing their own children. “The next generation will have to deal with the moral consequences of what is being done in the name of the Jewish people, and there will be a certain amount of shame,” he says. “That will require the Jews to reinvent ways of living as Jews that are not tied up in this narrative used to justify the destruction of Gaza. And I’m heartened that there are a lot of people, especially young people, who are beginning that work and who are not implicated in the system of Jewish supremacy.”
Beinart feels that Jews need a new narrative, different from the one they tell themselves to ignore the cries of others and shrug their shoulders at that pain, if not applaud it. He hopes that the destruction of Gaza will one day serve as a turning point in Jewish history. |
