Portside

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. By Peter Beinart
Alfred A. Knopf;  192 pages
Hardcover:  $26.00
January 28, 2025
ISBN-10 : ‎ 0593803892
ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0593803899

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.]