Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
I began to read Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart (Knopf, 2025) as the governments of Canada, France and the UK publicly declared that the Palestinian people’s suffering under Israel’s 19-month onslaught is intolerable. A cynic might say that this recent opposition is more about public relations to shield the global public from images of Palestinian kids being killed and starved in Gaza. This is a hi-tech enclosure of the commons, e.g., Palestinian land loss to the state of Israel via U.S. proxy for the benefit of a geopolitical order of, by and for private investors. This exercise of American hard power is a symptom of a rotting liberal democracy in which the two-party system serves millionaires and billionaires whose votes with their donor dollars perpetuate war and waste.
As a live-streamed genocide in Gaza unfolds, the author focuses on the roles of Judaism and Zionism amid Israeli expansion via Uncle Sam’s military aid wrapped in, according to him, “the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams.” Beinart focuses on the clash between Judaism and Zionism. To this end, he critiques the supremacist ideology of Zionism, legitimated with a false equation to Judaism, a religion. In today’s context of social media communication and saturation, Zionism as a dominant narrative is facing perhaps its biggest legitimation challenge from American Jews of a younger generation. Beinart is tuned into this contradiction.
Israel’s current barbarism against the Palestinians has an American parallel. Consider the California history that I did not learn as a boy. During the Gold Rush era, white settlers stole Native land amid a murder spree. The tribal population of 150,000 fell to 30,000. Meanwhile, 3,000 enslaved people of African descent lived and worked in this so-called free state [Discovering Daniel Blue: My Search for Significance, Purpose and Legacy (KP Publishing Company, 2025)].
Social media’s impact clashes with bipartisan support and its corporate paymasters that equate critical views of Israeli Zionism with anti-Judaism, going so far as to compare Palestinian resistance to Nazism. Beinart pushes back, unpacking this false equivalence in his five-chapter book. He names the groups whose messaging relies upon the falsification of Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonization as anti-Jewish, citing in part the Talmud, a central text in Judaism and source of Judaism’s law and study of God and faith.
There is an historical process linked to Israel’s state violence against Palestinians that benefits capitalist interests seeking to grow on the rebuilding and repopulating of Gaza. Crucially, it is on the public’s radar screen, thanks to President Trump’s transactional rhetoric. His declaration about the beautiful future awaiting private developers and financiers in the beachfront property of Gaza when the Palestinians are removed, once seen, can’t be unseen.
Take England’s Parliamentary Acts of 18th and 19th centuries, an exercise of state power and its legal use of force. These Acts drove peasants off the common lands, which became private property of the upper class, with severe penalties, including capital punishment. A parallel process, adjusted for the current moment, began in Gaza after October 7, 2023. A Democratic president oversaw shipments of military aid to Israel, and that is continuing with his GOP successor, in part providing Israel with 2,000-pound bombs to maim and murder Palestinians.
I see Beinart’s take on a moral revolt against Zionism in the context of a far-right political trend to replace democratic liberalism with autocratic extremism. The dual trends are two sides of the same coin, ruling beliefs and practices of a system destroying planetary society from the Amazon rainforest to the Arctic Sea and all points in between. For example, the U.S. military-industrial complex, directly and by proxy in the case of Israel, is the leading generator of carbon emissions cooking the planet.
Israel’s obliteration of Gaza after the surprise and unsurprising attack of Hamas on an Israeli settlement on October 7, 2023, hastens even liberal writers like Beinart to repeat unfounded rape allegations against the Palestinian attackers (page 90). To be clear, sexual violence is real and widespread. Allegations of it need attention, but fabrications also serve as a propaganda tool for ruling interests to control the narrative during military operations of a colonizer (Israel) against the colonized (Palestinians).
“Human Rights Watch was not able to gather verifiable information through interviews with survivors of or witnesses to rape during the assault on October 7, and there is only one public account reportedly from such a survivor.” https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/
At the end of the day, Beinart’s view of the state’s role in capitalist societies—in and out of Israel—to guide the growth of private investment limits his view of liberation solutions for the oppressed and oppressors. Thus his advocacy for a spiritually Jewish solution to U.S.-backed Israeli-led forever wars in the Middle East is, in my view, a necessary but insufficient step. In his book, for instance, he cites, favorably, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose take on the role of individuals in capitalist society includes this quote: “Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, [and] in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” However, the capitalist class controls the state and its legal use of violence. Poor and working-class people, unless and until they organize, lack a countervailing power to change the policies and politics of a capitalist state, waging forever wars against the biosphere and humanity.
There are limits to a moral argument for peace and social justice amid the current moment of ecological and social decay. Changing the foreign policy of the U.S. political system, for example, requires mass mobilization making demands on the state—such as healthcare and livable wages for all versus genocidal warfare in Gaza. Faith-based citizens certainly have a part to play. The great, late historian Alexander Saxton covers this nexus in Religion and the Human Prospect (Monthly Review Press, 2006).
Jewish communities can and are playing a role in such a transition, a process that Beinart is a part of—not apart from—as an academic and author with access to mainstream media. Faith-based groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the grassroots organizations of Reverend William Barber II, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, lead the way, along with other like-minded American advocates such as Public Citizen and the Council of American-Islamic Relations that are fed up with business as usual and pressing for structural social change that puts people before profits.
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