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WHAT DID THE WAR IN GAZA REVEAL ABOUT AMERICAN JUDAISM?  
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Interview with Peter Beinart by Isaac Chotiner
February 13, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ Peter Beinart on the story of Israel and the moral blind spot of
the Jewish diaspora. _

Jewish Voice for Peace demonstrators demand a cease-fire in the
Israel and Gaza conflict on October 18, 2023, in the Cannon House
Office Building in Washington, D.C., JVP

 

In a new book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A
Reckoning
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Peter Beinart argues that many American Jews who defend Israel have
lost their moral bearings. He makes the case, in a series of linked
essays, that Jews in America and around the world should push for a
single state comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories which
grants everyone equal rights. “This book is about the story Jews
tell ourselves to block out the screams,” Beinart writes. “It’s
about the story that enables our leaders, our families, and our
friends to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip—­the flattening
of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the
children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state
that speaks in our name—­and shrug, if not applaud.”

I recently spoke by phone with Beinart, whom I met almost twenty years
ago when I went to work for _The New Republic_. He had just stepped
down from a tenure editing the magazine, during which it endorsed both
the Iraq War and Joe Lieberman’s lethargic 2004 Presidential
campaign. After stepping down, Beinart renounced his support for the
war and started focussing more on issues having to do with Israel and
American Jewry. (His current newsletter
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Notebook.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for
length and clarity, we discussed what he misjudged about the U.S.’s
unwillingness to change its relationship to Israel, whether a
one-state solution is really a more likely alternative than two states
living side by side, and how debates over Israel have warped
conversations about antisemitism in America.

THERE WAS HOPE ABOUT A DECADE AGO AMONG PEOPLE LIKE YOURSELF THAT
AMERICAN JEWS—ESPECIALLY YOUNGER ONES—WERE MOVING AWAY FROM
IRONCLAD SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL. DO YOU FEEL SURPRISED OR DISAPPOINTED BY
THE DEGREE TO WHICH THE UNITED STATES, AND EVEN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY,
SEEMS TO HAVE NOT MOVED IN THAT DIRECTION AFTER OCTOBER 7TH?

I think I probably underestimated the degree to which, even inside the
Democratic Party, politicians could remain unresponsive to shifts in
public opinion, because they don’t really face much of a cost. There
are other forces that just matter more than public opinion.

WHICH ARE?

Well, the role of money in politics is a really, really big one. And I
think that was especially true for Joe Biden, because he didn’t have
the capacity to raise money from the public at large. He wasn’t a
Bernie Sanders or a Barack Obama who could raise large amounts of
money from small donations. It’s also a problem for members of
Congress. Except for a small handful of celebrity members, they are
not national figures who can raise enough money that they can compete
with an organization like _AIPAC_ if _AIPAC_ decides to target
them.

But I think there is a danger in focussing too exclusively on money.
Money plays a role in this, but there’s also a deep way in which the
Israeli story is one that’s very resonant to many Americans, because
it’s so similar to the American story. It’s a promised land forged
on a hostile frontier. And the more invested you are in America’s
own founding myth, the more you’re going to find Israel’s founding
myth appealing. I think a lot of people in the Republican Party, even
if there was no campaign financing at stake, find this narrative very,
very powerful. And Israel, in some ways, is a vision of what they
would like America to be, which is a country that’s more
nationalistic, more militaristic, has stronger border protection, and
has clear hierarchies based on ethnicity and religion.

As Edward Said famously said, Palestinians still lack permission to
narrate. Their story is in some ways a threatening story to
America’s founding myth. When you start using phrases like
“settler colonialism,” it doesn’t take much for Americans,
especially white Americans, to get uncomfortable. And beyond that,
October 7th was a horror. It was a horrifying event. And so there was
a natural desire to express sympathy and solidarity with Israeli Jews
in this moment of incredible trauma. And then the Israeli government
says, “O.K., you want to show you care about Israeli Jews? Then
support us in destroying the Gaza Strip.” It was a little bit like a
post-9/11 moment, when it was very difficult in the public discourse
to distinguish between the act of horror—what had happened, and
empathy for the victims—and a policy response, which was just
disastrous.

WHY WAS THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SO UNWILLING TO REALLY DO ANYTHING TO
SANCTION ISRAEL OR TO TRY TO STOP ITS BEHAVIOR?

If you come up in Washington politics and policy circles, you become
accustomed to a template for how you deal with Israel. And that
template is generally to avoid public fights, because those are not
going to go well for you. And I think the people in the Biden
Administration remember the Obama Administration. I will never forget
the moment when, after Obama basically gave a speech about how there
should be a Palestinian state near 1967 lines, Harry Reid, the
Democratic leader of the Senate, went before _AIPAC_ and threw Obama
under the bus.

If you’re in Washington for a long time, you almost turn off a part
of your brain when it comes to the question of Israel and Palestine.
You just take the safest political route and you block out some of
your human responses to what actually happens to Palestinians. You
just become so accustomed to basically just looking away and
rationalizing and not doing anything. I think folks in the Biden
Administration underestimated the degree to which ordinary progressive
Americans who had not undergone that kind of acculturation would
simply look at what was happening in the age of social media and say,
What the fuck? Why are we supporting this? And they underestimated the
degree to which Gaza mattered for American progressives.

ONE OF THE THINGS YOU SAY IN YOUR BOOK IS THAT MANY AMERICAN JEWS
RESPONDED DIFFERENTLY TO THIS WAR THAN THEY WOULD HAVE IF ANY OTHER
COUNTRY HAD DONE WHAT ISRAEL DID TO GAZA. HOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT
NOW?

Well, for most American Jews, it’s not just another country, right?
It’s a country that we have been raised to see as deeply,
intimately, connected to us, as a central part of our story—our
story of genocide and survival and rebirth. And it’s a story of
pride and safety. The Jewish tradition has this kind of metaphor of
family running through it, this kind of imagined family. Imagine if
you start getting pieces of evidence that members of your family are
doing terrible, terrible things, right? That’s very painful to
acknowledge. Plus, you recognize that generally people in a family
don’t take kindly to those members of the family who start saying,
“Hey, we’re doing horrible things.”

And this leads to the way the organized American Jewish community
really functions. Whatever Israel does, they come up with some
post-hoc justification. “It’s Hamas’s fault because it’s using
human shields. It’s the people in Gaza’s fault because they voted
for Hamas. The numbers are a lie—you can’t trust them.”

WHAT HAVE YOU MADE OF THE RESPONSE BOTH HERE AND IN ISRAEL TO
PRESIDENT TRUMP PROPOSING THAT PALESTINIANS BE FORCEFULLY KICKED OUT
OF GAZA AND SENT TO EGYPT AND JORDAN?

I think for Trump it’s an example of his naked imperialism, where
America should take territory for itself and he should personally
profit. But within Israel and the American-Jewish community it
confirmed my worst nightmare, which is that there was no independent
moral standard that could be established vis-à-vis Israel. That
whatever Israel did, there would be a post-hoc justification. Look at
the statement
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the American Jewish Committee. They say this is “concerning” but
the statement is incredibly weak and otherwise lauds Trump. The
Anti-Defamation League statement was also very weak.

So you don’t see a resounding rejection of this by the organized
American Jewish community. If you had said, before Trump’s proposal,
that Israel will try to do mass ethnic cleansing, you would have been
accused of being antisemitic. But now that Trump has proposed it,
Israeli politicians have embraced it. Even Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid,
the two most prominent centrists, have embraced it.

WHAT CHANGED YOUR THINKING ABOUT THE NEED FOR A ONE-STATE SOLUTION
VERSUS A TWO-STATE SOLUTION?

I spent my whole adult life as a supporter of the two-state solution,
of partition. I think two things changed. The first was just the
recognition that I was arguing the same position year after year after
year. And facts on the ground were changing, right? Every year, Israel
was more deeply entrenching itself in the West Bank, which would be
the heartland of a Palestinian state. And the chances of a Palestinian
state that could ever really be sovereign and contiguous were becoming
harder and harder to imagine. I found an article from someone saying
the two-state solution was almost dead. It was Anthony Lewis
writing a column
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“Five Minutes to Midnight”in the New York _Times,_ in 1982, when
there were maybe not even a hundred thousand settlers in the West
Bank. Now there are seven hundred thousand if you include East
Jerusalem.

It was actually a Palestinian interlocutor, I remember, who said,
“Peter, something can’t be perpetually dying. At a certain point,
it’s dead. And you have to be willing to think about
alternatives.” And, when I started to think about alternatives, I
came to the conclusion that this principle that Jews and Palestinians
should live under the same law in one political territory—this idea
is considered so radical and outlandish, if not downright antisemitic,
in American political discourse. But it’s actually the principle
that, as a general rule, we tend to think is the right principle for
most countries, including our own. And I was struck by
political-science literature that suggests that in divided societies,
things tend to be a lot more peaceful when everyone has a voice in
government.

If you support a two-state solution because you want to maintain
Israel as a Jewish state, that means that Jews will rule, that Jews
are going to be the vast majority of the population or at least the
vast majority of the population that can vote. You are in an
ethno-nationalist framework. I think I probably became more aware of
how uncomfortable that was when I started listening to Tucker Carlson
speaking that way about the United States. Because it is the discourse
of the ethno-nationalist right in the United States and in Europe,
that basically countries should be ruled by members of one tribe and
everybody else is a guest in the country. I began to be more
uncomfortable with making an exception to this principle for a Jewish
state. Especially because I noticed that that exception didn’t stay
in Israel, because Israel had been a bright shining example for every
ethno-nationalist who wanted to make their own country attack the
principle of equality under the law. I’m thinking of people like
Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany,
Narendra Modi in India.

AT ONE LEVEL, THE QUESTION COULD BE FRAMED AS WHETHER ISRAEL SHOULD
GIVE EQUAL RIGHTS TO EVERYONE IT RULES OVER. AND THAT SEEMS HARD, FOR
ME AT LEAST, TO ARGUE WITH. BUT THAT’S A LITTLE DIFFERENT FROM
SAYING, “MY LONG-TERM SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM IS THAT THESE PEOPLE
LIVE IN ONE DEMOCRATIC STATE TOGETHER RATHER THAN IN TWO PARTITIONED,
HOPEFULLY DEMOCRATIC STATES.” I AGREE THAT A TWO-STATE SOLUTION
SEEMS ALMOST DEAD. BUT ESPECIALLY AFTER OCTOBER 7TH AND GAZA, ISN’T
A ONE-STATE SOLUTION EVEN LESS LIKELY?

Both of them at this point are completely unrealistic. What is
realistic is that Israel maintains permanent control over millions of
Palestinians who lack basic rights and, indeed, moves toward the
destruction of the Palestinian people through active expulsion and
death. If you had to put a gun to my head and ask me what I think is
the most realistic likelihood that we will see over the coming decades
and generations, it would be what I would call an American-style
solution to the Palestinian question. By which I mean the
nineteenth-century American solution to Native Americans. You just
continue this process and it grinds away without restraint until
basically the population is destroyed as a functioning political
entity.

I think we’re in the process of seeing that play out. The question
to me is what force in the world could be powerful enough to stop that
and to create a different reality? To me, it seems like there would
need to be a mass movement of people all around the world in the
tradition of the anti-apartheid movement and the civil-rights
movement. It’s the power and strength of that movement that really
matters. And I think that movement almost inevitably has to be a
movement about human equality and freedom. It can’t have the moral
power it needs if it’s about partitioning into competing
ethno-nationalist states. I think a movement is going to be more
powerful if it is built around the principle of equality rather than
the principle of partition.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE WITHIN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE? DO YOU THINK
THEY WANT TO LIVE TOGETHER?

There was a vote last year in the Knesset on two states and not a
single member of a Jewish political party in Israel voted yes. So
that’s Israeli discourse. It’s basically the center is pro-status
quo, and the right is pro-expulsion. Among Palestinians, I think that
there was historically a desire for one equal state, what was
sometimes called the secular democratic Palestine. That was the P.L.O.
position.

Then there was this shift in 1988 where the P.L.O. accepted the idea
of a partition. And the truth is now we don’t really know, because
there’s no democratic process that exists among Palestinians for
them to express their political views. Most popular Palestinian
leaders are in jail. There are no elections in the West Bank or Gaza.
And so I guess one of the things that I should acknowledge about this
conversation is that my own view about this has to be deeply informed
by what Palestinians want. They’re the group of people who lack
rights. The way in which they want their rights to be vindicated is
crucially important.

And so as a process matter, it’s really, really important that we
support mechanisms by which Palestinians can actually create a
legitimate political process to reflect on these questions of one
versus two states. If we see some kind of legitimate process in which
Palestinians say, No, no, we still really want to commit to the idea
of two states, it’s kind of silly at that point for me to be more
Catholic than the Pope. But I don’t think we have that process. And
when I listen to what we have in the absence, which is the Palestinian
public discussion that one hears in the United States, or around the
world, I think the current has clearly moved toward the idea of
equality and historical justice in one space. And so, I think I’m
partly responding to that.

IN THE BOOK, YOU TALK ABOUT THE DEGREE TO WHICH AMERICAN JEWS ARE
BLAMED FOR THINGS THAT ISRAEL DOES AND HOW THAT IS OF COURSE
ANTISEMITISM. AND ALSO HOW MANY AMERICAN JEWS VIEW ANY CRITICISM OF
ISRAEL AS ANTISEMITIC. YOU AND I CAN SIT HERE AND SAY, WELL, THAT’S
ABSURD. BUT WHEN YOU HEAR JEWS SAY THAT THE PHRASE “FROM THE RIVER
TO THE SEA,” FOR EXAMPLE, IS ANTISEMITIC, DOES ANY PART OF YOU WANT
TO DEFER TO PEOPLE WHO MIGHT FEEL THAT WAY, EVEN IF YOU MIGHT DISAGREE
ON THE SUBSTANCE? HOW DO YOU WRESTLE WITH THE IDEA, WHICH WE HAVE
HEARD MORE OF IN THE LAST DECADE, THAT MINORITY GROUPS SHOULD BROADLY
GET TO DECIDE WHAT THEY CONSIDER OFFENSIVE?

Yeah, so the first thing is when people claim that only Black people
get to determine what constitutes anti-Black racism or only trans
people get to determine what constitutes transphobia, I sometimes
think, What country do they think we’re living in? Donald Trump just
outlawed D.E.I. The idea that those minority groups, or historically
disadvantaged groups, have complete power to determine the discourse
is nonsense.

I KNOW IT’S NOT HOW AMERICA FUNCTIONS IN 2025, BUT IT’S DEFINITELY
HOW A LOT OF PEOPLE ATTUNED TO BIGOTRY WISH IT FUNCTIONED. TO ME THE
QUESTION IS WHETHER, GENERICALLY SPEAKING, ONE SHOULD BE USING TERMS
THAT MANY PEOPLE USE IN A BIGOTED WAY EVEN IF YOU DON’T MEAN IT THAT
WAY.

First of all, I don’t like the idea that basically only members of
one ethnic, racial, religious group should have a monopoly on defining
what discrimination means, whether they’re Black or whether
they’re L.G.B.T., whatever. First of all, because it quashes the
diversity that exists within every community, right? There is
political diversity in every community. Just because people have the
same identity status doesn’t mean they all see the world in the same
way. And that’s especially true for Jews. As you know, there’s a
very profound division among American Jews now on some pretty basic
questions related to Israel. And you see it most strongly among
younger American Jews, where you find polling which shows that maybe
not a majority, but very large minorities of American Jews think
Israel is an apartheid state and that, depending on how you ask it,
many of them have very serious concerns about Zionism.

So the irony becomes that when you paint Jews as monolithic and say,
basically, that anti-Zionism constitutes antisemitism, the way that
plays out on college campuses is that a bunch of the students who then
get suspended and disciplined are Jews. You get this absurd situation
where Jewish Voice for Peace is suspended at Columbia. And the
Anti-Defamation League congratulates the president for keeping Jews
safe. Well, not those Jews, right?

Let’s say that you think Black people should get to define what
constitutes anti-Black racism, so Jews should get to define what
constitutes antisemitism as it relates to Palestinians. The problem
with this is that the relationship between Jews and Palestinians is
not the same as the relationship between white and Black people.
Palestinians are not the historically superior group that have ruled
over Jews for generations. They’re the group that, in
Israel-Palestine, is legally subordinate and that the United States
has basically marginalized from public discussion. So when you say
that Palestinian discourse, which tends to be anti-Zionist, should be
deemed antisemitic because a lot of Jews find it antisemitic, you’re
completely erasing the Palestinian experience. And what you end up
doing is basically silencing Palestinians and not allowing them to
speak about their experience.

I think the phrase, “Palestine will be free from the river to the
sea,” is not the smartest phrase to use. I think it would be much
better to say, “_Palestinians_ will be free from the river to the
sea,” right? Because the question of what the future Palestine would
be and what it would mean for Jews is unclear. And so given that lack
of clarity, and especially given the nature of Jewish public discourse
about Palestinians, it’s not surprising that a lot of Jews would
fill in the blanks as basically meaning, this is war. They’re going
to put us on boats in the Mediterranean, or oppress us, or even kill
us.

THE PHRASE HIGHLIGHTS YOUR LARGER POINT THOUGH, BECAUSE TODAY ISRAEL
LITERALLY CONTROLS THE TERRITORY FROM THE JORDAN RIVER TO THE
MEDITERRANEAN SEA. AND IT DOES SO WITH THE HELP OF THE U.S.
GOVERNMENT. PALESTINIANS ARE NOT GIVEN FULL RIGHTS IN THAT TERRITORY.
IT DOES FEEL LIKE A LOT OF THESE CONVERSATIONS END UP POSITING A
HYPOTHETICAL WORLD WHERE JEWS ARE UNDER MUCH GREATER THREAT THAN THEY
ARE TODAY. BUT IN THE ACTUAL WORLD, PALESTINIANS ARE LIVING IN WHAT IS
ESSENTIALLY A ONE-STATE REALITY WITH UNEQUAL RIGHTS. AND THE AMERICAN
DISCOURSE JUST FEELS LIKE IT HAS VERY LITTLE SPACE FOR THAT.

Yes, that’s exactly right. One of the points I try to make in the
book is that I think this is actually consistent with how discourses
that assume legal supremacy tend to operate. There was a huge amount
of focus among Protestants in Northern Ireland about the prospect that
they would be dominated or even killed if Catholics got political
equality. So Ian Paisley, the Protestant leader, calls the Good Friday
Agreement, which gives Catholics political equality, a prelude to
genocide.

Among white South Africans—I know this firsthand, because I spent
part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa—it was considered
utterly obvious that a Black government would put white people in
mortal danger. And if you look at America during slavery and
segregation, there’s so much discourse in which whites are basically
saying, “If we’re not the slave masters, we will be the slaves.”
And so this tendency to not be able to imagine equality, but indeed to
imagine that the end of your supremacy will mean your oppression or
death, which I think is the way a lot of American and American Jewish
discourse functions when it comes to Palestinians, is, I think,
typical.

IN THE BOOK, YOU MENTION SOME EXTREME REMARKS FROM PRIME MINISTER
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, AND REFER TO THEM AS “A KIND OF THEOLOGY. ISRAEL
IS RIGHTEOUS BY DEFINITION. ITS WAR IN GAZA REMAINS MORAL EVEN WHEN
ITS CRIMES ARE DOCUMENTED FOR ALL TO SEE.” THE USE OF THE WORD
THEOLOGY REALLY STUCK OUT TO ME, BECAUSE YOUR BOOK DOES ENGAGE IN SOME
THEOLOGY AND CLOSE READING OF JEWISH TEXTS, WHICH YOU TAKE SERIOUSLY.
IS THERE A TENSION BETWEEN WANTING TO ENGAGE WITH JEWISH RELIGIOUS
TEXTS, AND THEN ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THEOLOGY CAN PREVENT CLEAR
THINKING?

I guess my view is that religions speak in multiple voices. And
because they speak in multiple voices, religious traditions can aid
forces of oppression and they can aid forces of liberation. Judaism is
complicated—it has a powerful universalistic voice, and it also has
a powerful particularist or tribal voice. And what I think has
happened in a lot of American Jewish life, and in other Jewish
communities all around the world, is that this tension, which is
central to Judaism itself, has been swallowed by ethno-nationalism. In
a lot of American Jewish institutions, you get in more trouble if you
question the legitimacy of the State of Israel than if you question
the authority of the Torah, right? Which is just a very strange thing.

Hillel, which serves Jewish college students, basically has this
statement of radical pluralism. It’s, like, We don’t care if you
keep kosher. We don’t care if you keep Shabbat. None of that’s
important. Bring your whole self. Except if you’re anti-Zionist. And
this is the expression of the treatment of a state as a God, as a
substitute religion. That basically we’re open to all kinds of
radical conversations about central questions in Judaism, but not to
questions about the legitimacy of the state. That is sacrosanct. And
that, to me, is really, really dangerous, because when you worship
states, you elevate them above the dignity and rights of the human
beings under their control. And that’s how I think you get to a
place where people justify Gaza. They say, Israel’s right to exist
is nonnegotiable. But the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza to live,
eh, that’s not so important.

_Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the
principal contributor to Q. & A.
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public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and
more._

 

* Israel-Gaza War
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* American Jewish community
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* blindspotting
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