If you ever wanted proof that some people will twist every Jewish instinct for survival into a moral failing, Peter Beinart just handed it to you in book form. His latest work, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” is not a thoughtful critique. It is a 250 page exercise in self flagellation dressed up as moral courage. Beinart takes the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, reduces it to a footnote, and then spends the rest of the pages blaming the Jewish state (and the Jews who support it) for daring to fight back.
Let us be brutally clear. The title itself is grotesque. “The Destruction of Gaza”? That is not a neutral description. It is Hamas propaganda wrapped in a fancy Knopf dust jacket. On October 7 2023 Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1200 Israelis, raped women at a music festival, burned babies alive, and dragged hostages into tunnels. Beinart barely pauses on that horror. Instead he treats Israel’s response as the real crime, the one that demands a complete rewriting of Jewish identity. He calls this a “reckoning.” I call it intellectual surrender.
Beinart opens with a cloying “note to my ex friend,” positioning himself as the brave heretic walking beside the Talmudic rabbi while the rest of us tribal Jews stay stuck in our evil ways. How noble. He then moves on to Purim, Passover, and Hanukkah, claiming our holidays are nothing but a childish script of “they tried to kill us, we survived, we eat.” According to him these celebrations erase Jewish capacity for violence and turn us into permanent victims who cannot see Palestinian suffering.
Spare me the lecture. Jewish holidays are survival stories because Jewish history is a survival story. We did not invent the hatred aimed at us. Haman, Pharaoh, Antiochus, Hitler, and now Hamas all had one thing in common: they wanted us dead. Celebrating the fact that we are still here is not moral blindness. It is sanity. Beinart wants us to read the bloody end of the Book of Esther and feel guilty instead of grateful. Sorry, Peter. I will keep my hamantaschen and my self respect.
The real heart of the book is the 1948 section, where Beinart performs the standard anti Zionist magic trick. He quotes Benny Morris selectively to claim the entire Palestinian exodus was a preplanned ethnic cleansing by bloodthirsty Zionists. He skips the small detail that five Arab armies invaded the day Israel declared independence after the Jews accepted the UN partition plan and the Arabs rejected it. He ignores the Arab leaders who told Palestinians to leave so the invading armies could “drive the Jews into the sea.” He airbrushes away the 850000 Jews kicked out of Arab countries at the same time. Context is for suckers, apparently.
Then comes the modern day portion, where Beinart recycles every tired slogan. Israel is an “apartheid” state. Jewish self determination is really “supremacy.” Security barriers, checkpoints, and military operations are not responses to suicide bombers and rocket attacks but proof that Jews have become the new Pharaohs. He even suggests the very name “Israel” is problematic because it implies the state belongs to the Jewish people. Yes, he really wrote that.
This is not progressive thought. It is the soft bigotry of low expectations for everyone except Jews. Palestinians get endless excuses for rejectionism, terrorism, and charter level antisemitism. Jews get endless lectures about how their desire not to be murdered again is the real problem.
Here is why this book is actually dangerous, not just annoying. Beinart is not some fringe crank. He is a respected voice in certain liberal Jewish circles. When he reframes October 7 as a minor speed bump on the road to “the destruction of Gaza,” he gives young Jews permission to distance themselves from Israel and from their own people. He tells them that standing with the Jewish state after the worst pogrom in decades is somehow a betrayal of Jewish ethics. That is not moral clarity. That is moral poison.
Beinart claims he still loves the Jewish family. He just wants us to stop being so darn tribal. Translation: he wants us to trade our survival instinct for his universalist fantasy. History has a name for that fantasy. It is called the diaspora, and it ended in gas chambers once before.
If you are Jewish and you read this book, do yourself a favor. Close it after the first chapter, look at the photos from October 7, and remember why Israel exists. Then ask yourself a simple question. When the next Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran backed massacre comes, do you want Peter Beinart writing the Jewish response? Or do you want a people who finally learned that “never again” is not a suggestion?
The reckoning we actually need is not with Israel. It is with the Peter Beinarts of the world who would rather lecture their own people than face the enemies who want us gone. This book is not a reckoning. It is a suicide note with beautiful prose and impeccable citations. Do not buy it. Do not read it. And for the love of everything holy, do not let it become the new normal in Jewish conversation.
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