Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza - Peter Beinart

 

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Peter Beinart’s latest book, is interesting for those curious about: Judaism, Israel and Zionism.  Peter Beinart focuses significantly upon his perception that we Jews believe that we are “The Victims” in various contexts (incorrectly).

 

Talking of Purim Beinart states:

Haman is hanged.  Mordecai takes his job.  Good triumphs over evil.

When we tell the story of Purim today, many of us stop there.   But that’s not quite right.  The book of Esther doesn’t end with Haman’s death.  It continues because although Haman is gone, his edict to kill the Jews remains.  … “The Jews struck at their enemies with the sword,” proclaims the book of Esther, “slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.”  On the thirteenth day of the month of Ada, the Jews killing seventy-five thousand people.  They make the fourteenth “a day of feasting and merrymaking.”  With the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry.  That’s the origin of Purim.

Purim isn’t only about the danger gentiles pose to us.  It is also about the danger we pose to them. … Today, these blood-soaked verses should unsettle us. …

More often we look away.   We focus on what they tried to do to us.   There’s a joke that every Jewish holiday has the same plot: “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.”  (p.11-13)

Beinart talks further about how other Jewish holidays relate to perceived victimhood.

You rarely hear this at Passover seders, but according to the Bible, our ancestors were slaves and slaveholders too.  … It imagines us as virtuous victims who survive great horrors.  And then it brings down the curtain, until the show begins again.  …

It’s not surprising then, that victim often feels like our natural role.  …

People familiar with the Hebrew Bible will note a glaring omission: the book of Joshua, which explains how these Jewish rulers became rulers in the first place.  According to the text, the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua Ben Nun conquered Canaan from the seven nations that lived there.  The AJC’s chronology skips over that.  …

So then why does the AJC ignore the Bible’s account of Joshua’s invasion?  Because it contradicts our contemporary narrative of victimhood.  (p.14-16)

Peter Beinart, with great clarity, describes how mainstream Jewish groups selectively quote the Bible to justify their political aims related to “We Jews returning to our historical home (in Israel)” (my words).

But Israeli and American Jewish officials offer another argument for why The Arab governments and not Israel are to blame for roughly three quarters of a million Palestinians leaving their homes…

This argument too, is mostly fiction.  A 1948 report by Israel’s own intelligence service concluded that Zionist attacks accounted for roughly 70 percent of the Palestinians departures, while orders from Arab forces accounted for roughly 5 percent.   …

The harsh truth is that Zionist forces had to expel large numbers of Palestinians in order to create a Jewish-majority state.  The prewar Palestinian population was simply too large.  In November 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab countries, Jews were only one-third of the population.  Thus even the state earmarked for Jews – which would have encompassed 55 percent of Mandatory Palestine – would have almost half Palestinians.   Since Jews lived largely in urban areas, Palestinians also owned 80% of the Jewish state’s arable land.   … A month after the UN vote, Ben Gurion told members of his political party, “Only a state with at least 80 percent Jews is a viable and stable state.”   (p.20-21)

Readers who know little, can readily (potentially) see the validity of Beinart’s perspectives.  They can readily see his deep caring for both Palestinians and fellow Jews.   His political/systemic logic comfortably fits with his core religious beliefs.    Beinart talks at a deeply personal level.   He speaks of his own South African Jewish background.    It is very clear how he cares greatly for family, and community – Jewish community particularly.    He makes clear how We, as Jews, are not and should not be united in support of Israel for both ethical and practical reasons (in the long term).

White South Africans were just as afraid of being thrown into the sea as Israeli Jews are now.  Perhaps more afraid since they constituted a smaller share of the population and had fewer allies overseas.  They considered Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress a terrorist group, and they weren’t alone.  It was designated that by the U.S. Government.  The Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) whose unofficial slogan was “one settler, one bullet” – appeared even more menacing.  Even Blacks who not employ violent resistances themselves, like Bishop Desmond Tutu, who in 1984 wont the Nobel Peace Prize, were reluctant to condemn it, just as many Palestinians are today.   (p.109)

Beinart continues (in the quote above,) discussing the great fear that white South Africans had.  He continues discussing the deep fears of massive killings in Ireland, before a peaceful solution was found there.

Relating things to Israel today, Beinart continues:

In her 2023 book, Collective Inequality, the Israeli scholar Limor Yehuda notes that countries that practice “political exclusion and structural discrimination” are far more likely to experience “civil wars”.

You can see this dynamic even in Israel itself.  Every day, Israeli Jews who are deathly afraid of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank place themselves in Palestinian hands when they’re at their most vulnerable on the operating table.   Palestinian citizens – sometimes called “Arab Israelis” – constitute 25 percent of Israel’s doctors, 30 percent of its nurses, and 60 percent of its pharmacists.  Yet few Israeli Jews fear they’ll be bludgeoned when they enter a hospital or poisoned when they enter a drugstore.  (p.113) …

Beinart continues his narrative comparing and contrasting the eventual inclusion of “the others” in the three countries (S. Africa, Ireland and Israel)   He notes that the former two countries still have major inequalities, but are at least seriously trying to move positively towards the future.

Today, Jews don’t only fear Palestinians; we fear the entire “axis of resistance,” which has its headquarters in Iran and branches from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq.   … (Related to Iran) The message was clear: when Palestinians stop fighting Israel, we will too.

This doesn’t mean that once Palestinians gain their freedom, peace will break out across the Middle East.   It doesn’t even guarantee peace in Israel and Palestine.  …

A future Palestine-Israel would face all these challenges.  It would also face one that the United States and South Africa do not: it has no overarching national identity.   … (p.114-5)

There are proposals for addressing this challenge: confederation between a Palestinian and a Jewish state, federation within one binational state, a democratic system – like the one in binational Belgium – that guarantees both communities a voice in major decisions.  The details matter, but they matter less than the underlying principles.  Wherever they live together, Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law.  And they should work to repair the injustices of the past.  The Jews who were made refugees on October 7 should be allowed to go home.  And the Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home.  Historical wrongs can never be fully undone.   But the more sincere the effort, the greater the reconciliation that ensues.

No country fully lives these principles.  But even when applied imperfectly, they can create miracles. (p.115)

American Jews don’t need to search for the hidden antisemitism in every nineteen year old anthropology major, or Lutheran grandmother, who condemns Israel because they can’t bare seeing another Palestinian child die.   …  We can lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world.  (p.117)

I remember walking with my then twelve-year-old son through the old market in Hebron… The Palestinian friend with whom we walked had been arrested and beaten countless times.  He lived with indignities that would have driven me to hatred or despair; or both.  Suddenly he disappeared.  My fear began to mount.  There were only Palestinians around.  …

Then my friend reemerged.  He had ducked into a shop and come out with a Bar Mitzvah present for my son.  His true gift, I realize now, wasn’t the ceramic pomegranate he bought.  It was helping a young Jew grow up without racism and fear. (p.119-120).

I’m crying now, as I complete this review.   Peter Beinart is one I’ve grown to “love”, though we’ve never been in the same physical space together (we almost got together in NYC earlier this year).

Neither my words above, nor reading this book, will necessarily help me reach some of those I care about!   Peter Beinart and I both have been touched by personal connection points with others who we were taught to fear.   I’m going to send this writing via email to a number of Jewish People who matter to me, including a relative.  I hope that he, and at least one of my  friends, will step out of their comfort zone, and be curious.   The gulf that exists between us where I have often remained silent, while triggered, is over.  

I won’t (further) “attack” them.  Most likely I won’t ever bring Palestine-Israel up with any of them beyond sending them this writing now.   I will continue trying to see them, when where they live and/or invite them to join me when they are in the Bay Area.

The genocide that we in the U.S. are complicit in is too much a part of me – to continue to Listen, without responding to words I’ve heard over and over and over again!

I know that you care!   It is up to you – if you choose, or when you choose – to read the book and/or to get further out of your comfort zone, and actually interact with Palestinian-Americans and/or others – who also Care – and disagree strongly with your core beliefs.

I will reference several of my other writings – in concluding:

https://www.georgemarx.org/2019/03/dr-marc-lamont-hill-american-muslims.html - from 2019 - well before – October 7^th and:

https://www.georgemarx.org/2023/12/rashid-tlaib-amazing-wonderful.html - from December, 2023, several months after October 7th.