Peter Beinart: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Gespräch mit Karen Attiah, Bookstore Politics and Prose, Washington DC, February 25, 2025.
Here I am picking an interview with Beinhart, conducted with Karen Attiah, on February 25, 2025 in a crowded bookstore in Washington DC, which I find particularly moving. Beinhart struggles for concrete answers to concrete ethical questions in the face of the destruction of Gaza and the ongoing genocide in Palestine – based on his Jewish faith and his understanding of Jewish tradition. He sees the self-definition of so many Jewish communities in terms of Zionism and the state of Israel and the legitimation of apartheid and genocide as necessary to protect Judaism as an expression of spiritual poverty and the trivialization of Jewish tradition. Almost always, he says, the history of the Jewish people is told only as a story of victims and self-assertion: the Jewish people in a struggle for survival with absolute evil, with “Amalek.” This ignores the fact that in the biblical stories, Jews are also perpetrators and capable of committing mass crimes – like any people. Awareness of the possibility of being a perpetrator is important for spiritual practice and ethical-religious education. He calls for a Judaism in which Jews need and claim equal rights wherever they live, and not the supremacy of a state that denies self-determination and human rights to the members of another people.
Beinhart talks about Jewish friends and relatives, “loved ones”, who have broken ties with him because of his clear stance on genocide. They are silent or turn away from him because they cannot face sincere discussions and do not want to listen. It is impressive that, despite his passionate claims, Beinhart never becomes morally overbearing or hardened. He rejects instrumentalization of the hostages and avoids professions of “empathy”. The empathy he shows to the hostages is all the more credible, including a deep sense of a shared belonging to the Jewish people.
In a longer passage in the conversation he talks about his experiences in South Africa, where a supremacist elite, fearing the violent resistance and revenge of the ANC, also could not imagine the abolition of apartheid. The histories of South Africa and also Irelands teach us that security increases when repressive regimes come to an end, because then terrorist resistance becomes superfluous. Beinhart wants to apply this lesson to Israel/Palestine. Yet, it’s best if you listen for yourself: