A Kinder, Gentler Eliminationism

A review of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart, 172 pages (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, January 2025)

In Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Beinart urges Jews—pleads with Jews—to reconnect to our tradition of universalist justice as articulated in the Bible and the Talmud. He quotes Rabbi Shai Held: “There can be no Jewish theology without a fundamental commitment to human solidarity.” For many Jews—and for most Jewish Israelis—solidarity with the Palestinian “other” has become far more difficult since the atrocities of 7 October 2023. But, Beinart writes, the events of that day have only made solidarity more urgent. He argues that the ability to see and respond to the suffering and the humanity of the Palestinian “other” is now a categorical imperative—not just for the sake of Palestinians, but also to revive Jewish ethical life, which he believes is in tatters. Beinart’s moral exigency weaves itself throughout the book.

Beinart writes fiercely, and rightly so, about the injustice of the Israeli occupation. Palestinians in the West Bank are deprived of sovereignty, citizenship, representative government, the rule of law, land, and physical safety. This is not only miserable for Palestinians, but it has corrupted Israeli society at virtually every level. Beinart is right when he argues that freedom for Palestinians would liberate Israelis too. “We don’t need to warp the souls of young Israeli Jews by sending them to humiliate men in front of their children and restrain screaming women as bulldozers demolish their homes.”

But this is also a deeply duplicitous book. Beinart’s political project—articulated in a variety of venues, including the New York Times, the anti-Zionist magazine Jewish Currents, his Substack newsletter, and his tweets—is obscured here. Readers unaware of his other work might not catch it or its full implications, hidden as it is behind soothing euphemisms like “equality” and the “right of return.” Beinart’s project, bluntly stated, is the dismantling of a state for the Jewish people—under any government, within any borders. In its place, he advocates a “binational” state with an Arab majority (which the “right of return” would produce), in which the Jews would presumably be a well-protected, flourishing, and even cherished minority. Fear of a very different outcome is, he writes, “theoretical” and, he has argued elsewhere, a neurotic holdover from the Holocaust.

This program leads Beinart into some very bad places: misleading accounts of history, ludicrous analogies, credulity (or perhaps faux-naivety), and a complete unwillingness—or inability—to grapple with either the century-long history of the Arab–Israeli conflict or the global political trends of the post-WWII period. Beinart addresses this book to the Jewish public in America, and he seems to see himself as a brave dissident speaking his truth to its power. But I suspect that his arguments will find an audience mainly among young (and some not-so-young) anti-Zionist “progressives,” whether Jewish or not, whose politics it flatters. It will not do much to enlighten the heated debates within the American Jewish community since 7 October, and it will almost certainly have no impact in Israel. The vast majority of Jewish Israelis, including most on the (now minuscule) Left, regard Beinart’s program as a suicidal non-starter. Many Arab Israelis would oppose it too; Ayman Odeh, leader of the Arab Joint List and the most prominent Arab politician in Israel, is a two-stater.

“This book,” Beinart declares in his prologue, “is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams” of others—in this case, the screams of Gazans under Israeli bombardment and siege. In his view, the Jewish story (though isn’t there more than one?) is a Manichean one in which Jews play the role of perpetual victims, sometimes self-pitying, sometimes self-righteous, always oblivious to the pain of others. But, he argues, “We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense.” He reminds us that the story of Purim isn’t only a heroic tale about how brave Queen Esther saved her people from extermination by the evil Haman. According to the Book of Esther, the Jews then “struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies” by killing 75,000 people. Of course this never happened, but Beinart’s point is that we ignore those parts of our heritage in which we—by which he means Israelis—harm, and even destroy, others. “Today,” he writes, “these blood-soaked verses should unsettle us.”

Beinart is most eloquent when describing Palestinian suffering. He writes of the fates of the 2023 graduating class of a dental school in Gaza. (Yes, Gaza—which before this war was frequently described as an “open-air prison” or even a “concentration camp”—had dental schools.) Two students were killed by Israeli air strikes, and another discovered her dead grandmother beneath rubble. He continues:

Ola Salama’s uncle’s body had been found with no head or feet after Israel bombed his house. Mazen Alwahidi had lost forty-six pounds and was eating donkey feed. Noor Shehada was surviving on wild herbs. Rabeha Nabeel and her family had been displaced five times and eventually returned to their home to find it without walls. Areej al-Astal had managed to give birth despite being so short on food that she gained no weight during her pregnancy. More than one hundred members of her extended family were dead. “The word ‘dreams’ has ended,” she told the Times. “It no longer exists in our imagination.”

The most obvious problem with the perpetual-victim argument is that political Zionism was precisely a rejection of Jewish victimisation. But Beinart doesn’t like that story much either, which he repeatedly equates with “supremacy.” And to replace what he sees as the simplistic tale of Jewish victimhood and unearned innocence, he creates an equally simplistic tale of Palestinian victimhood and earned innocence (or, if you like, of unrelenting Israeli malevolence and aggression). His Manichean mindset repeatedly leads him to false either/or constructs, such as when he states, “Israel doesn’t have a Hamas problem. It has a Palestinian problem.” Couldn’t it be—isn’t it in fact—both? And though he professes deep concern for Palestinians (which is, I believe, entirely genuine), he doesn’t really take them—or, certainly, their political movements—seriously. They are the objects of Israeli politics, Israeli aims, Israeli actions, never subjects in their own right. They react rather than create. Is that what recognising the humanity of the “other” means?

Beinart recounts Israeli atrocities in detail, which is necessary, but he has surprisingly little to say about other aspects of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Equally important, he misrepresents that conflict as a local one between two small peoples rather than an international one involving a bewildering array of states and non-state, or quasi-state, terrorist groups. He largely ignores the political and emotional consequences of the often-violent, post-1948 expulsion (which he describes as a “hasty departure”) of the 750,000 Jews who had lived in Arab countries for centuries. As a result of this ethnic cleansing, the Arab world is now virtually Judenrein. Those refugees, and their descendants, make up the majority of the Jewish Israeli population today, and their animosity toward becoming, once more, a minority within an Arab-majority state has nothing to do with the Holocaust.

The campaign of attacks waged by Palestinian militias against the Yishuv—the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine before Israel’s creation—is ignored. The Arabs’ rejection of an Arab state in Palestine after the UN voted for partition in 1947 is also given short shrift (one brief phrase), though this was surely a world-historic error that looks worse with each passing year. Beinart fails to adequately explain the origin of the 1948–49 war that followed: the invasion by five Arab states, which declared a “war of extermination” (in the words of the Arab League’s Azzam Bey) the day after Israel declared independence. That invasion—whose stated intent was genocidal—is also the origin of the Nakba, though Beinart is loath to acknowledge this. In Beinart’s rather unique telling—one that I have never read before, even in the most revisionist of revisionist histories—the Arab armies were simply trying to protect Palestinian civilians who were being forced out. (Beinart cites a 1959 article by the historian Walid Khalidi, based on “extensive”—though unnamed—“Arab government documents and press reports,” which does not inspire confidence.)

Beinart makes no mention of the causes of the 1967 war—apparently, one day Israel simply decided to take over the West Bank—or of the Yom Kippur war, launched by Egypt and Syria, in 1973. There is nothing here about the Arab states’ decades-long refusal to recognise, negotiate, or make peace with Israel, or of the boycotts that they hoped would crush the state economically. The hundreds of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, pre-1967—before there was an occupation or a single Jewish settlement in the West Bank or Gaza—are left unmentioned. Iran, Hezbollah, and the “axis of resistance” receive scant notice. Thus, when Beinart writes, “Israel was created by displacing roughly 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, and it displaced several hundred thousand more in 1967,” he is telling the truth, but he is also leaving out a lot.

Yet it is hard—actually, impossible—to understand the politics, which includes the emotions, of the present conflict without acknowledging the precarity and violence with which Israelis have lived since their state’s creation. This does not justify Israel’s creeping settlements, its settler violence and irredentism, its racist and demagogic elements, or the alarming influence of its fascist Right. But Beinart’s book leaves the impression that Israelis have experienced peace and security (more or less) for decades, though this can’t quite explain why, unlike the citizens of most other countries, they need an Iron Dome defence system, “safe rooms” in their houses, and bomb shelters everywhere.

For Beinart, Israelis’ fear of a neighbouring Palestinian state—to say nothing of a “binational” alternative—derives not from painful experience but is, rather, the result of a Holocaust-induced but now anachronistic “Jewish trauma.” As he wrote in a lengthy essay for Jewish Currents (where he is editor-at-large) titled “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine” in 2020: “Ever since the Holocaust, Jews have retroactively projected Nazism’s exterminationist program on Palestinian opposition to pre-state Zionism. But this Holocaust lens distorts how Palestinians actually behaved: not like genocidal Jew-haters, but rather like other peoples seeking national rights.”

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This statement provides a valuable illustration of Beinart’s method. Of course, not all Palestinians are genocidaires, much less Nazis (despite Benjamin Netanyahu’s claims). But Palestinians haven’t just struggled for “national rights.” They have also struggled to eradicate the State of Israel—that is, to deny another people their sovereignty, to destroy their institutions, and to kill them. The main contradiction of the Palestinian movement—and a key to its repeated defeats—is that it has never settled the question of which aim it is actually striving for: To create a state or to destroy a state? 7 October made clear that this issue is, tragically, still undecided. Israelis also face an existential decision that they have failed to make for decades: Is their main project the revival of their democracy or the prevention of a Palestinian state?

Beinart often starts sentences with phrases like “Evidence shows,” but his use of evidence is strikingly selective, which can only undermine his credibility.

The history of the Arab–Israeli conflict (which, with the addition of Iran, Islamist groups, and ultra-religious Israeli settlers is now also a Muslim–Jewish conflict) is complicated and messy. Beinart prefers clean, uncluttered lines. He often starts sentences with phrases like “Evidence shows,” but his use of evidence is strikingly selective, which can only undermine his credibility with readers who know more about the conflict’s contemporary politics and its history than Beinart offers. For instance, he cites a public opinion poll conducted “just before October 7” that found Hamas to be “quite unpopular” in Gaza. But a poll conducted by the Arab World Research and Development group a month after 7 October, reported in Haaretz and elsewhere, revealed that 75 percent of Gazans supported the October orgy of violence and 76 percent believed Hamas was “playing a positive role”; only thirteen percent opposed the massacre. It is entirely possible that public opinion has changed yet again; Palestinians, like everyone else, have contradictory ideas and contradictory feelings. But Beinart’s use of evidence brings the term “cherry-picking” to a whole new level.

Rather than wrestle with facts that might complicate his argument, Beinart habitually disregards them, which is the definition of intellectual bad faith. He chides mainstream Jewish organisations—rightly, I think—that have cancelled speakers deemed too critical of or hostile to Israel. These institutions, he charges, are guilty of “abandoning the intellectual openness in which we once took pride.” But that openness was eroded long ago, and since 7 October it is almost impossible to discern. Beinart ignores the countervailing campaign, especially in the US and England, to excise “Zionists” from public life: the attempt to isolate Israeli academics and universities (originated decades ago by the BDS campaign, a movement that he praises); the recent open letter calling for a boycott of Israeli writers, publishers, and cultural institutions, which has been endorsed by more than 2,700 writers and other artists; the vilification of the Jewish chief executive (since resigned) of the free-speech organisation PEN for her presumed “longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East”; the chants of “Zionists not welcome here” by student protesters who shout down Israeli speakers; the animus toward Israeli students at US universities; the calls to boycott Disney films that feature Israeli actors; the protests at museums, literary events, and bookstores from Brooklyn to Seattle that dare to address Jewish, much less Israeli, subjects. Among the cultural elite today, and certainly in “progressive” circles, rejection of Israel qua Israel is the ticket of admission; anti-Zionism has become the very definition of political virtue. (When was the last time you heard of an Israeli writer on a book tour?) It is remarkable that Beinart discusses none of this.

Beinart’s political program requires the normalisation of Hamas, and he expends a lot of energy attempting to accomplish this goal. He cites the claim of Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif (now dead) that 7 October was a protest against Israel’s non-compliance with international law. Is there anyone on Earth who believes that Hamas cares about, much less defends, international law? Beinart also insists that Hamas doesn’t use civilians as human shields; to believe that it does “piles fallacy upon fallacy.” And in a sense he is right. Hamas’s tactic is far more radical: it has used hundreds of millions of dollars in aid (with Netanyahu’s diabolical encouragement) to build an underground tunnel network—estimated to be between 350 and 450 miles in length and replete with food, fuel, and electricity—and openly declared after 7 October that this protection was solely for the use of its fighters.

Think about how many Gazans—how many children—could have been saved if they had been allowed to shelter underground. While hungry, dirty, immiserated Gazans staggered through the ruins of their towns and cities after the January 2025 ceasefire, the New York Times reported that Hamas fighters re-emerged from their bunkers “wearing clean uniforms, in good shape and driving decent cars.”

Beinart deems Hamas’s tactic of embedding its fighters among its civilian population to be “typical of insurgent groups.” Most liberation movements I can think of have sought to protect their people, and especially their young people, as much as possible. Yet as Gaza was being decimated by Israeli bombs, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar (since killed) extolled the deaths of his own people, proclaiming that their corpses would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.” The more death, the better; that’s an unusual strategy. Also atypical: burning families alive, raping women, murdering children in front of their parents and vice versa, kidnapping infants and the elderly, murdering hundreds of people at a music festival, and then celebrating these cruelties in front of the world. Beinart cannot, of course, be faulted for failing to anticipate the 7 October attacks (though the Israeli government, military, and intelligence services can). Still, it takes enormous gullibility to write, as he did in 2020, “Jews who have spent decades developing relationships with Hamas leaders ... are ridiculed or ignored when they suggest that these leaders are willing to live in peace.”

Even after the calamity of 7 October and the subsequent missile barrages from Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias, Beinart doesn’t consider the “axis of resistance” and its “ring of fire” to be much of a problem. Solving the Palestinian question—on his terms—will, he believes, mitigate their ferocious animosity. This is exactly backwards: the Palestinians are, essentially, expendable pawns of Iran, Hezbollah, and assorted Islamist groups, which believe that a Jewish state in any part of Mandatory Palestine—Waqf land—is a sin not against the Palestinians but against Allah. That is why the Zionist “cancerous tumor” (in the words of Ayatollah Khamenei) must be excised. Hamas declares that it is the religious duty of every Muslim to fight “the Jews” in Palestine (it recently described Israel as “Nazi-Zionism” as it released four female hostages). Borders are irrelevant; the struggle is eschatological. Hezbollah, for its part, has always been honest; its founding charter vows to achieve the “final obliteration” of Israel. As one of its fighters told the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins last year, the solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict is “very simple. ... When they [the Jews] leave on the same boat they came from.”

Many Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians do not, of course, adhere to these views. But it is wishful thinking to imagine that those who do are an inconsequential minority. Hamas believes it has a future, and it may be right: “We’re ... the war’s next day,” proclaimed a Hamas banner as its fighters paraded three emaciated Israeli hostages before cameras in a grotesque theatre of cruelty. For decades, Hezbollah has been Lebanon’s most powerful military and political force (though this may have changed due to Israel’s attacks). Any realistic political solution must take these forces into account. Beinart often cites post-apartheid South Africa (which is not a binational state), and even Belgium, as models for a combined Israel-Palestine. But given the history of the conflict and its players—including the increasingly violent, messianic Israeli settlers in the West Bank—why wouldn’t a more likely outcome be Iraq, Lebanon, or the former Yugoslavia?

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Beinart is eager to believe what people (like the late Mohammed Deif) and groups say about themselves when they are attempting to persuade people like him. He cites Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace—which he identifies (correctly, alas) as the most influential anti-Zionist groups on American college campuses—as striving for “equality” between Israelis and Palestinians because this word appears in their mission statements. But wait: Students for Justice in Palestine openly celebrated the 7 October attacks as a liberation event and praised Hamas’s “martyrs.” Jewish Voice for Peace held a memorial service for Hezbollah’s assassinated leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and wrote, “‘Death to Israel’ is not just a threat. It is a moral imperative and the only acceptable solution. May the entire colony burn to the ground for good.” This is the kind of equality that Israelis fear.

In a similar vein, Beinart defends the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” which could, perhaps, be ambiguous; but he says nothing about “Two, Four, Six, Eight! We Want All of ’48!,” whose meaning is quite clear. Beinart wants a kinder, gentler anti-Zionism—he begins some sentences with the plaintive phrase “I wish”—at exactly the moment when it has become most venomous.

When he addresses the existential threats to Israel, Beinart uses analogies that undermine his own argument. The Jewish state is, he claims, no different from any other country in having its very right to existence questioned or even denied. (He ignores the troubling fact that the United Nations has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than criticising all other nations combined.) “The legitimacy of a Jewish state ... is conditional on how it behaves,” he argues. It’s immediately obvious that this condition does not apply to any other country. Even after the Holocaust, nobody suggested that Germany abolish itself (though it was partitioned); even during the Algerian War, nobody suggested that France was an illegitimate state. Still, Beinart insists, Israel is far from unique: “Americans challenge the legitimacy of foreign political systems all the time,” he writes. “Members of Congress question whether communist parties should run China … [or] whether tyrannical clerics should run Iran.”

Unfortunately for Beinart, this disproves his very point (was there an editor in the house?): anti-Zionists don’t object to the rule of the Likud, they object to the country of Israel. I suspect that even Peter Beinart wouldn’t dare tell the Chinese or Iranians that their sovereignty should be abolished, much less insist that they merge with a historically hostile neighbour to create a new mutant polity. I doubt he would stand in Dhaka and tell Bangladeshis to re-join Pakistan, or in Kiev and suggest that Ukrainians unite with Russia, or in Beirut and tell Lebanese to integrate into Syria—all in the interests of “equality,” of course.

There is one kind of Zionism that Beinart likes: the old-fashioned kind, when Jews were willing to settle for a non-sovereign homeland—a cultural oasis—dependent upon a larger, more powerful entity. “The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel,” he wrote in Jewish Currents. In his new book, he argues, “In Jewish tradition, states have no inherent value.” Of course, for most of the centuries that have comprised the Jewish tradition, the world was not organised into nation-states. (Theodor Herzl did title his 1896 book The Jewish State, but Beinart believes that he didn’t really mean it.) Certainly, there were early influential Zionists, such as Ahad Ha’am, who did not envisage an independent state, and a (very) few who imagined a binational one. But why do they constitute “the essence”? 

Mainstream Zionism evolved into a demand for independent statehood, and as the political theorist Shany Mor has pointed out in the British journal Fathom, it did so for three main reasons. First, the concept of national self-determination, especially among minority peoples, developed with the breakup of empires after WWI and, then, with the anti-colonial movements that transformed the world after WWII. Zionism was part of this larger trend. (According to the Council on Foreign Relations, there were just fifty recognised states in 1920; today, the United Nations recognises 193.) Second, European Jewry was almost wiped out, and Jews made the unhappy discovery that genocide was not just a German project, but a European-wide one. Minority status and dependence on others meant death. Third, an obsessive form of Jew-hatred developed in the Arab world along with its nationalist and anti-colonial movements, some of which were strongly influenced by European fascism. Beinart dwells in an oddly nostalgic, pre-state world of 19th-century protectorates, autonomous regions, and so-called national homes. States, including Israel, can of course do terrible things. But the pre-state world—the world of colonies and empires—was no utopia.

For Beinart, there is something un-Jewish about statehood. In Jewish Currents, he argued that a state for the Jewish people is as anachronistic as animal sacrifice, a practice that the Jews wisely abandoned long ago. The comparison is absurd, but in one sense he is right. Zionism was a largely left-wing rebellion against exilic Judaism, which the Zionists equated with political passivity and religious obscurantism. As the political theorist Michael Walzer has written, “Zionism was, and could only be, the creation of people who were hostile to Judaism.”

Here is the great dialectic of Zionism: it was this rejection of Judaism—this hostility to Judaism—that saved the Jewish people and offered them an opportunity to flourish. One of the weirdest things about Beinart’s views is that he regards the Zionists’ ability to respond to the cataclysmic political events of the 1930s and ’40s—an ability that is surely the prime job of any political movement—as a betrayal and a moral failure. Beinart posits state and homeland as opposites, but in fact they are dialectically entwined: a state is necessary to protect a homeland. If you doubt this, ask the Kurds, the Ukrainians—or the Palestinians.

Peter Beinart has written hundreds of thousands of words advocating a “democratic binational state.” It is time for him to answer some questions. How would such a state be formed, since most Israelis adamantly oppose it? Why would the right of return—which Israelis from across the political spectrum oppose, and which has been an insurmountable stumbling block in peace negotiations—lead to “greater ... reconciliation”? Israelis are a notably fractious people who have never written a constitution; how would they write one in alliance with another people whose political history and institutions are quite different? What would the status of women be? Would LGBTQ rights be protected? Would the state be secular, and if so in what sense? Would Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and other terror militias be incorporated into the Israeli armed forces (or vice versa)? What would the state’s foreign policy be? What kind of legal system would it have? Who would keep the peace among hostile factions? What would happen to those—whether Israeli or Palestinian—who opposed the binational project? Most of all, who would decide all this, and how?

But perhaps there is really only one germane question, which underlies the others: How can two peoples, who have been killing each other for a hundred years—and who, especially at this moment, hate and fear each other as never before—join together in a peaceful, democratic union? The situation in Israel and Palestine today is the worst of my lifetime. Each day seems to usher in a new nadir. I share Beinart’s sense of urgency and desperation. But without answers to such questions, he is simply playing with other peoples’ lives.

Like Beinart, I have struggled with what it means to be a diaspora Jew after 7 October and the subsequent carnage. Beinart promises a prescription—a sort of “how to” guide—but his solution does not answer my questions, mitigate my conundrums, or allay my despair. He suggests replacing a seemingly impossible but sane compromise (two states) with the imposition of a seemingly impossible and sure to be violent alternative. I read Jewish history differently than Beinart does. Powerlessness, pariahdom, and dependence on the kindness of others did not serve us well. Centuries of oppression deformed Jewish life. Surely, the solution to the ruinous present is not to go back to a catastrophic past.