Portside

In a new book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” 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 is called “The Beinart 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 from 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 headlined “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., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.