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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF 2025  
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Paul Buhle
July 26, 2025
Portside

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_ If denial of collective self-determination of a people is a sin of
the modern age, as Israeli defenders often repeat, what of the
self-determination of Palestinians? Palestinian violence falls and
rises when the hopes for autonomy...[are] crushed... _

Gaza City - Then and Now: View of Gaza City, Omar Mukhtar Street,
2006; Aerial photographs of the Gaza Strip, including High-rises in
Gaza City and the Palestine Bank Tower (top). Buildings along Omar
al-Mukhtar Road, the main artery through Zeitoun, district, collapsed
under bombardment (satellite image south of Omar al-Mukhtar Road, Oct.
12, 2023) (Photo credits: Top: work released into the public domain by
its author, Grauesel at wikivoyage shared; Bottom: Aerial photo: The
Guardian, 12/15/23

 

We might later recall the early Summer of 2025 for many things,
certainly including the passage of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”
and the bombing of Iran nuclear sites. Probably also for Supreme Court
rulings that endanger Constitutional protections. But close observers
of American politics are likely, left-leaning people very likely, to
remember the successful nomination campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New
York. They may also remember a new book by a famous author whose work
seems to be the intellectual counterpart of the Mamdani campaign

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, a Reckoning. 
[[link removed]]By
Peter Beinart
Alfred A. Knopf;  192 pages
Hardcover:  $26.00
January 28, 2025
ISBN-10 : ‎ 0593803892
ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0593803899

 
Alfred A. Knopf / PenguinRandomHouse
It is safe to say that Peter Beinart is one of the most surprising as
well as eloquent writers of our time. Why surprising? Because he
moved, within the past half-dozen years or so, from the “moderate”
camp of somewhat critical Israeli supporters to the forefront of those
warning that the Israeli state has taken a bad and self-destructive as
well as needlessly brutal turn. And that they have almost reached a
point of no return.

This book is, above all, an immanent critique, a story of his own
journey from religious orthodoxy, Zionist orthodoxy in Israel to a
step-by-step realization that somewhere, buried deep in a particular
understanding of Jewish life and faith, an ethno-superior ideology had
seized control.

Beinart writes and speaks on camera everywhere these days, it seems. A
professor of journalism at CUNY, he has taken an especially remarkable
role in the world of Jewish progressives: the one really famous
editor-at-large (or any editor) of _Jewish Currents_. This historic
leftwing magazine, established after the close of the Second World War
(original title, _Jewish Life_) to reach the generational successors
to the Yiddish press,  carried sympathetic journalism about the
young state of Israel along with more expectable contents, such as
progressive interracial sentiments, hopes for US democracy and staunch
opposition to the Cold War. _Jewish Currents_ upheld, in the English
language, the socialistic traditions of _Yiddishkayt_, the fading
language and culture of five million Jews martyred in Europe.

This older _Jewish Currents_ had a small following, no famous
writers, and many strong connections to the leftwing, summer camp
culture. Its back pages were filled with announcements of funds given
to the magazine —often memorials to late relatives, even a decade
after their deaths. Its editor, Morris U. Schappes, stayed at his post
well into his 80s and met me, occasionally, over hot pastrami or
tongue sandwiches in a favorite luncheonette off Union Square. It was
a trip into the past. After Schappes’ retirement, the magazine
merged itself for a little while with the historically anticommunist
socialists of the Workmen’s Circle, then broke off again. The
magazine is now in new hands, young hands, no longer “secular,”
also more devoted to the arts than before. And to bolder politics.

Thanks not only to Peter Beinart, _Jewish Currents_ is very much
about Israel, but definitely in a new key. Beinart writes in the
book’s introduction (“A Note to My Former Friend”) that a
significant breach now exists between Israelis and American Jews.
“When I enter a synagogue, I am no longer sure who will extend their
hand and who will look away.” (p.3). He views an erstwhile
friend’s “single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral
and self-defeating” (p.5) But he urgently wants to continue the
journey together.

How did he himself stray? With Shabbat meals in Capetown, South
Africa, on a visit to relatives during his college years, he learned
that the “kitchen help,” Black people, were considered by his
relatives at once distinctively subordinate, necessary…and
dangerous. If they ever gained something like equality, the formerly
persecuted would surely take revenge and return the punishment. But
following the collapse of Apartheid, the dreaded assault somehow never
happened. The perceived _need_ for the enforced subordination of the
Other had never existed and could be seen in retrospect not only as
cruel, but also as absurd.

Later in the book, he adds Northern Ireland’s Protestants in the
“Time of Troubles.” Like his South African relatives, they
envisioned a maddened, endless terror campaign against them if the
armed (in this case, British) occupation were ever to end. How could
they let down their guard? And yet they did, and the old troubles
became mainly annoying, like the Israeli flags sometimes seen these
days in the surviving hard-line Protestant sections of Belfast—a
bitter response to widespread sympathy for Palestinians in the Irish
Republic.

In Israel, when Jews at the Shabbat table summon up past cries of
suffering, they “know” that the subordinated Palestinians,
supplying them with a variety of useful services, must be faking their
own pain. If there are those in real pain, they must have brought the
suffering upon themselves. The Other, always a threat, must be
controlled. All this is yet a little more strange, especially in
today’s Israel, where twenty percent of physicians are Palestinians,
a proportion higher for medical assistants in places like the dental
clinics. How is it that so much health care is delivered by mortal
enemies?

For the author, this kind of common sense evidence becomes the big
Gaza metaphor. Israeli life cemented by the engrained, oft-repeated
historic commitment of Jewish communality against the outside world
has become something very different. “Jewish leaders have turned our
moral commitment to each other into a sedative.” (p.10).

 But perhaps, he suggests, the drama and the pure horror of Gaza can
also be a turning point. Jews are not history’s permanent victims,
Beinart  insists, nor are they immune from history’s judgment. The
large-scale secularization of Jewish life, even within Israel,
ironically obliterates the complexity of the once-dominant Biblical
tales in which Jewish tribes, Jewish leaders, were not so innocent and
in which the Deity commanded that Jews make hard judgments of their
own behavior. 

Biblical texts later mostly ignored by Jewish American liberals were
used by Zionist pioneers to glorify the narrative of conquest
sounds—much like any other European or American colonial claim.
“If you wanted land and believed you hailed from a more advanced
civilization….that was justification enough” (pp.17-18) to
conquer, subordinate or even replace the current inhabitants.

The displacement of three-quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948
has been cast, in nearly all Israeli scholarship and journalism, as a
result of Arabs starting a war. Beinart notes that the Arab armies
actually responded to the forced evacuation of Jaffa and Haifa,
Palestine’s two key cities, already largely accomplished. If denial
of collective self-determination of a people is a sin of the modern
age, as Israeli defenders often repeat, what of the self-determination
of Palestinians? “There is no universal right to a state in which
your tribe rules everyone else.” (p.25) And again, “By seeing a
Jewish state as forever abused, never the abuser, we deny its capacity
for evil. Before October 7, I thought I understood the dangers of this
way of thinking. Turns out I had no idea.” (p.31)

 If different, more timeless conclusions could be drawn from the same
Judaic texts or others, moral judgments might possibly shift: this is
surely the urgent appeal of the book.

Most of the rest of _Being Jewish After the  Destruction of
Gaza_ treats the outcome of the events of Oct.7, 2023, and makes the
case, in several ways, that Palestinian violence falls and rises when
the hopes for autonomy, freedom to create a society of their own, goes
through the same cycle of hopes crushed, leaving no hopes behind. By
1995, with the Oslo Accords apparently on the horizon, no more than 18
percent of Palestinians favored violence against Israelis. Then
Benjamin Netanyahu came to power.

Beinart explains how Jewish-American mainstream organizations
abandoned the traditional liberal view of antisemitic threats from the
(racist and conservative) Right for the purported threats from the
Left. Did sections of the US Left misrepresent “Jewish” views at
times? Most definitely. But the Anti-Defamation League’s notorious
1970 pamphlet, _The New Anti-Semitism,_ insisted that anti-Zionism
of any kind constituted anti-Semitism vastly more dangerous than the
rightwing variety. Coinciding with the rise of Palestinian nationalism
in the real world, this insistence lay the groundwork for a sustained,
hugely funded campaign against activists, Jewish or not, who oppose
Israeli misdeeds. In the real world, according to a Europe-wide study,
“the best predictor of antisemitism” remains rightwing xenophobia,
a truth that cannot be discussed seriously, let alone considered
acceptable. (83)

There are more claims and persuasive arguments here about contrasting
narratives. “From the River to the Sea,” for instance, a dread
phrase considered almost to be a blood libel, can easily be found in
the proud claims made by Netanyahu among others to Israeli
sovereignty. Likewise, by a “remarkable act of projection” (p.89)
a phrase like “intifada,” meaning a popular uprising, whether
Paris Commune or Warsaw Ghetto revolt, becomes only one thing.
Against _that_ thing, any and all Israeli responses must be morally
justified.

The significance of Beinart’s book rests upon other grounds, I
think. His life experience including time spent with relatives, fellow
Israelis, fellow Jews in Israel, South Africa and the USA have given
this wonderfully thoughtful writer a way to see reality in fresh ways.
This is a gift that no reader, Jewish or otherwise, should aside.##

_[PAUL BUHLE usually ended up the Emcee, introducing the really
important people. He is the author or editor of 53 volumes including
histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean,
studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art
volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James. He
co-edited the outsize oral history tome Tender Comrades, with Patrick
McGilligan, and with co-author Dave Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen,
the biography of Abraham Lincoln Polonsky. With Mari Jo Buhle and Dan
Georgakas, he co-edited the Encyclopedia of the American Left
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* Gaza
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* West Bank
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* Palestine
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* Genocide
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* war crimes
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* starvation
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* apartheid
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* Palestinians
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* Nakba
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* Israel
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* IDF
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* Israeli Defense Forces
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* Oct. 7
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* Hostages
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* Hamas
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Ceasefire
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* U.S.-Israel military aid
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* BDS
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* Sanctions
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* Peter Beinart
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* Jewish Currents
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