Peter Beinart's Fantasy of Persuasion

Peter Beinart is, depending on who you ask, a turncoat or a hero, a speaker of the truth or a purveyor of lies, an opportunist or one of the few public intellectuals – if that term means anything anymore – who is willing to publicly change his mind. He is best known, especially among Jews, for changing his mind about Israel. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025) is the latest chapter in Beinart’s evolution on the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as his contribution to the flurry of recent and forthcoming books on the Jewish relationship to nationhood, notable works of which include Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile, Daniel Boyarin’s The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto, and Sim Kern’s priggishly titled Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation. I’m sure that as the slow gears of the publishing industry turn, and as more Jews attempt to “reckon” – to use Beinart’s word – with the aftermath of this latest outbreak of Israeli violence against Palestinians, yet more will appear. These books deal with a variety of themes, from activism to Talmudic exegesis to diasporic identity, and all seem to have the aim of, for a certain receptive audience, carving out space for a Judaism that does not center Zionism.

There’s not much in Being Jewish that will be new to anyone with even a passing familiarity with this genre, or indeed anyone who has educated themselves to the slightest degree about Israel’s actions in Palestine in the past century. But that’s the point. Being Jewish is targeted at fence-sitters, at the mythical persuadable Zionists who could be tempted to read pro-Palestine literature. Beinart claims as much, repeatedly: In an interview in the New Yorker, he says that the book is “written for my community, my friends and even my family,” presumably the same community he repeatedly lambasts in Being Jewish for its uncritical Zionism; in another interview for NPR, he says that he “wanted to write to people who look away” from the horrors that Israel has wrought on Palestinians. Being Jewish is introductory and hits all the predictable notes, notes that are arguably more resonant elsewhere, because its aim is to persuade those who have very intentionally avoided educating themselves. 

Likely because of this stated aim, much of Being Jewish is preoccupied with debunking. There are responses to all the greatest hits of Zionist talking points: that the Gaza Health Ministry’s statistics inflate the number of Palestinians killed (they’re considered internationally reliable), that Israel’s roots were not colonial (they were, explicitly so). There are refutations of the idea that Hamas is defeasible (Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation long predated Hamas, and Hamas’s popularity only grows during periods of Israeli aggression) and that the American political left’s opposition of Israel comes from a place of antisemitism (antisemitic attitudes are found in numerous polls to be far more common on the Israel-loving political right, and people on the political left are able to separate antisemitism from anti-Zionism even when prompted by researchers to make such an association). Beinart anticipates the responses to his arguments for Palestinian rights and preempts them, so much so that his preemptive defenses nearly dwarf his actual arguments. 

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But there’s an underlying problem in Being Jewish that no amount of debunking can defuse: no Zionist will ever read this book. The opening salvo of Being Jewish is a note addressed to a friend with whom Beinart has broken over the Israel-Palestine conflict, a friend who considers Beinart’s criticism of Israel a betrayal of the Jewish community. “By reading these words,” Beinart writes in the claustrophobic second person, “you have agreed to walk with me.” Why would a friend who considered Beinart a traitor and stopped speaking to him over the very issue of Israel and Palestine agree to read these words? Many Jews know that in certain Jewish spaces, the mere mention of Israel can kill a conversation; Beinart’s book is also replete with examples of Jewish organizations censoring any and all criticism of Israel. Beinart claims in an interview in the Guardian that he took so long to learn about Palestine because he was “too comfortable living … a relatively privileged and cloistered existence,” and that it was ultimately professional pressure that forced him out of his cloister for fear of being too “radically out of step with people.” The average Zionist, especially one without similar professional pressures and one for whom being pro-Palestine might even have professional consequences, would never give up the comfort of ignorance. The words “destruction of Gaza” are in the book’s very title – will those who ignore or justify that destruction really be willing to read a book whose title condemns it? 

The only possible reason that a Zionist could be persuaded to read such a book, or so Beinart seems to believe, is if it was written by a fellow Zionist. If they won’t listen to the “screams of Palestinians,” in his phrasing, maybe they’ll listen to one of their own. Though he’s now known as a critic of Israel, most American Jews can also remember a time when Beinart was one of the louder voices on the other side, a vocal advocate for the oxymoron of liberal Zionism. From the opening chapters, Beinart takes every opportunity to gesture at the evolution of his own views in an attempt to connect with his hypothetical Zionist readers: he sympathizes with his Zionist former friend in the opening chapter and later claims that at one point in his life, he would have felt “fury” if someone had suggested that Israel bore even partial responsibility for the events of October 7. The final chapter of Being Jewish concludes with Beinart’s confession that he “grew up believing deeply in the necessity of a Jewish state.”

Unfortunately, Beinart’s attempts to connect with Zionists fall apart under scrutiny. His first foray into criticism of Israel was an article in the New York Review of Books in 2010, in which he excoriated the growing illiberalism of the Israeli government (Netanyahu became Prime Minister for the second time in 2009, after a short stint in the late 90s). That article became a book, 2012’s The Crisis of Zionism, which attempted to revitalize and rehabilitate Zionism by advocating for a return to Israel’s stated, if hypocritical, founding ideals of democracy and liberalism. Back then, Beinart was still a Zionist – but his was a tenuous Zionism, a “Zionism of refuge” inherited from a grandmother who had lived through multiple displacements due to her Judaism, one that was not extended to a Jewish state that did not strive for liberal democracy. Even this comparatively tame stance led to intense criticism from the American Jewish establishment – mostly, because his support for Israel was conditional, while theirs is not. 

The Crisis of Zionism was published 12 years ago, and being a Zionist isn’t the same today as it was back then. Even if at some point more than 12 years ago Beinart did buy into uncritical, mainstream Zionism, that doesn’t mean that he can understand or relate to the levels of cognitive dissonance required to maintain one’s Zionism after the destruction of Gaza. Violence in Palestine has long been undercovered by major news outlets, and what coverage does exist is often biased, but for the past year it has been impossible to ignore. 

October 7 was an inflection point for many Jews: those, myself included, who were either already tentatively pro-Palestine or were not so dogmatically Zionist as to ignore or excuse the front pages of every major media outlet took the opportunity to learn more about Palestinian history and Israeli violence, but many Jews buried their heads deeper into the sand. The mental gymnastics to excuse are far more difficult to execute now than they were when Beinart was still any kind of Zionist, much less a mainstream one. The Zionist constituency that once existed -- those whose ignorance, if not entirely innocent, did not require the same levels of iron will, and whose otherwise liberal politics made them malleable and persuadable -- is gone now. His attempts to connect with today’s Zionist holdouts is unconvincing in the context of the shifting ideological landscape of contemporary Zionism.

So if Zionists won’t read his book and Beinart’s effort to connect with them fails, what about people who are pro-Palestine? There are two reasons why that group of people won’t gain much from the book either. First, as already mentioned, Beinart doesn’t make many arguments that this group of people hasn’t heard before – why read Beinart when you’ve already read a dozen books and articles that say the same thing? Most of the ideas expressed in Being Jewish aren’t new even to prior readers of Beinart: many arguments or anecdotes are taken, nearly verbatim, from the Crisis of Zionism or two of the much-discussed articles Beinart has written about Israel-Palestine since then. Second, because it is framed to appeal to Zionists, Being Jewish sometimes comes across as pandering to Zionism in a way that will almost certainly alienate Jews who have already been persuaded of Israel’s many crimes. There’s a lot of space given to the discussion of the centuries of violent antisemitism against Jews, something frequently invoked by Zionists as justification for the necessity of Israel’s existence. There’s a lot of space spent acknowledging covert – and sometimes overt – antisemitism on the left, even though Beinart later “debunks” the idea that the left is truly antisemitic. To us, the credence Beinart gives to Jewish anxiety about the necessity of a Jewish state and the possibility of expulsion from our liberal democratic homes is anachronistic and beside the point, and his decision to center Jews rather than Palestinians in a discussion of Gaza comes off as narcissistic.

Beinart has a frustrating tendency to gesture at broad ideals rather than make finer political points in service of what he claims is the bigger picture. A crucial, central ambiguity in Being Jewish is what the future of Israel-Palestine should look like. Beinart says in interviews that he supports a one-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians are given equal rights, and there are echoes of that position in the book, though it’s rarely explicitly endorsed. He claims that Israelis and Palestinians are “too intermingled to be divided by a hard border” and argues that the idea of a Jewish state rests on an ideological foundation of unacceptable Jewish supremacy. This implies that there ought not be a Jewish-majority state, though Beinart prefers to express the sentiment elsewhere, likely for fear of alienating the audience to which he otherwise panders. “The details matter,” he writes of a laundry list of proposals for reorganizing Israel-Palestine, “but they matter less than the underlying principles.” 

Do they? Beinart grew up partially in apartheid South Africa, a country whose history he often puts in parallel with Israel’s. He observes that South Africa has remained “hideously unequal” since the end of apartheid and that the enfranchisement of Black South Africans did not resolve South Africa’s racial inequality, which persists to this day. There’s only a single line in Being Jewish about the right of return – “Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home” – sandwiched between placations that Jews ought not be expelled from their homes either. Beinart’s primary motivation seems to be to force Zionists to recognize the humanity of Palestinians, but how Israel-Palestine is organized after the killing stops is essential to determining whether Palestinians ultimately get justice. Gesturing at “underlying principles” is a start, but it’s insufficient – the details do matter, because the details are how those principles are expressed. Invoking “underlying principles” also risks raising the question of which principles Beinart is actually talking about: the future of Israel-Palestine looks starkly different depending on which principle is prioritized, whether it’s human rights, reparations, self-determination, justice, or some combination of all of them. Leaving the door open as to what kind of solution he actually endorses gives his readers little to work toward or aspire to and makes possible a peace that, while infinitely preferable to the current situation, does not do enough to ensure Palestinian liberation. 

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Like any good rhetorician or debater, Beinart understands that in order to persuade people, you have to appeal to something they care about. In his early writing on Israel, this was liberalism. In the New York Review of Books in 2010, Beinart wrote that the American Jewish establishment’s growing estrangement from liberalism would both alienate younger American Jews unwilling to support an illiberal Israel and enable and legitimize Netanyahu’s corrupt, far-right government. This would result, he predicted, in the further erosion of Palestinian rights and with the takeover of American Jewish organizations by politically conservative Orthodox Jews, who were then and are now the fastest-growing demographic of American Jewry. 

As evidenced by his choice of venue, at the time, Beinart was writing to the existing liberal Zionist establishment, a demographic that has been rendered obsolete by October 7th. He warned of what would happen to American Jewish organizations, and to Israel, if people continued to look away from Palestine and urged the establishment to return to its liberal roots, roots he hoped were a priori to Zionism. The problem with this argument, which Beinart himself recognized at the time, was that the liberalism of the Zionist old guard was, in his words, “fake.” You can’t appeal to a principle that has already been suspended for a certain cause to change someone’s mind about that very cause. He believed that liberal Zionists’ liberalism was unshakeable everywhere but on the Israel question, when in fact supporting Israel had begun to corrode their liberalism’s foundations, a process that reached its zenith in the aftermath of October 7th. In Beinart’s community, where I also grew up, I know certain people voted for Trump because they were single-issue Israel voters. At that point, does their lip service to liberalism or the Democratic Party mean anything if the weight of their vote and their money, when it matters, are thrown behind a titan of illiberalism?

The people that Beinart needs to convince in 2025 are different from those he was trying to convince in 2012, and his tactics have changed accordingly. There are no appeals to political liberalism by name in Being Jewish, because Beinart rightly assumes that the people he now needs to convince are no longer liberals. There are some appeals to human rights, to the value of enfranchisement both morally and as an instrument to reduce violence, and to the antisemitism of the political right, but the word “liberal” is nowhere to be found. 

Instead, Beinart appeals to Jewish instincts for tribalism and self-preservation. Jews, Beinart argues, are one big family. “No Jew is without relatives,” he tells us, recounting a parable from the Talmud. His sentimental discussions of Jewish community and religious life serve not only to appeal to his target audience but to illustrate the commonality of Jewish experience and to assert himself as a member of the tribe. If Jews’ liberalism with regard to Israel has been corrupted because of their ruinous impulse to protect their own, Beinart intends to appeal to that impulse instead. 

Other than debunking, much of the book is devoted to arguments about why continuing to oppress Palestinians is actually bad for Jews and Israelis. To Beinart’s credit, not all of it is; he doesn’t abandon appeals for Palestinian humanity, but he does make them by pointing to Jewish hypocrisy in humanizing Israelis taken hostage by Hamas but not Palestinians killed or maimed by Israel’s bombs, trading on Jewish tribalism to make a point about Palestinian rights. Theologically and historically, he argues, states were mere instruments whose “right to exist” was inseparable from their action. “The legitimacy of a Jewish state – like the holiness of the Jewish people – is conditional on how it behaves,” Beinart writes of biblical accounts of Jewish statehood. The Jewish victimhood narrative is based largely on a misreading of tales like Hanukkah and Purim, in which the endings of these stories, where victorious Jews become murderous despots themselves, are elided. In one of the most interesting arguments of the book, Beinart compares the uncritical support of Israel to idolatry: contemporary Jews tolerate criticism of God, but not criticism of Israel. Support of Israel corrupts us spiritually and is based on a faulty understanding of Jewish theology.

Then there’s the practical argument. Committing violence against Palestinians has been empirically shown to stoke Palestinian support for violence. Palestinian support for violence drops precipitously during periods when peace seems like a viable prospect, and most Hamas militants have experienced Israeli violence against them or their loved ones. Beinart details how Hamas recruits from devastated families to swell its ranks, capitalizing on grieving families’ anger at their oppressors. Violence begets violence, oppression begets justified, and often armed, resistance – as such, oppressing Palestinians actually makes Israelis less safe. Beinart also lists multiple post-conflict societies, including South Africa, in which oppressed groups’ enfranchisement and access to political power actually minimized violent conflict. People do not take up arms lightly, he argues, and are less likely to do so when given the ability to make their voices heard in a nonviolent manner. The problem, then, is that Israel will not give Palestinians citizenship, that it controls every aspect of their lives without allowing them basic rights of self-determination or legitimate self-governance. The denial of rights to Palestinians, he concludes, also makes Israelis less safe. 

Beinart is on shakier ground when appealing to Palestinian rights from the perspective of Jewish tribalism. For one, Beinart acknowledges the corruptibility of tribalism himself. He writes that Jews’ commitment to each other has been “turned into a moral sedative” by opportunistic Zionist leaders. In conversations in the wake of October 7 that ignored Palestinian humanity, he recounts that he “saw Judaism redefined as a purely tribal creed.” It’s unclear where the line is between “pure tribalism” and the warm, communal family ties that Beinart frequently invokes to ingratiate himself to his readers, but it’s clear he’s walking it. 

The idea of Jews as one big family is itself shaky and ahistorical. Jews, by virtue of being a diasporic people, originate from myriad countries and speak myriad languages and have disparate traditions and levels of religiosity. According to Pew Research, 60% of Orthodox Jews see no commonality with Reform Jews, and 50% of Reform Jews see no commonality with Orthodox Jews. Beinart’s idea of Jews as a family requires us to at least buy into the illusion of commonality, despite our history of sometimes-violent tensions. If Jews no longer even see commonality with each other, it’s unclear where to situate Beinart’s belief in Jewish unity.

What, then, does he believe unifies all Jews? Beinart never gives a clear answer to this question, leaving readers — as Beinart would hope, Zionist readers — to decide for themselves. If all that unifies Jews is the common experience of antisemitism, rather than the common practice of religion, Jewish unity becomes reliant on the perception that one has experienced oppression. Jews’ self-mythologization as history’s perpetual victims is a key driver of the justification many Zionists make for the necessity of Israel, that Israel is a refuge. Part of what is so seductive about Zionism as a unifying force for all Jews is precisely that it is disconnected from the diversity of Jewish history and even from religious practice. In fact, the impetus for the invention of a unified Jewish identity was early Zionism: in order to get donations and political capital from Jews all over the diaspora, early Zionists had to persuade them that they had something in common with their fellow Jews, no matter how alien that concept may have seemed at the time. Further, Beinart’s rejection of Zionism, for many Jewish readers, will be a rejection of what, for many of us, is the only or most significant commonality we see with all other Jews. I worry that in grounding his appeal for Palestinian rights in an appeal to pan-Jewish unity without defining the source of that unity or arguing how it can exist independently of Zionism, Beinart risks falling into Zionism’s trap.

There are also moral issues with arguing for Palestinian rights from the perspective of Jewish tribalism. I’m reminded of Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 article, “Who Goes Nazi?,” about what types of people are enticed by authoritarian ideologies. She writes:

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi…Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.

What kind of code is tribalism, and where is its wisdom? No argument for Palestinian rights is coherent without an appeal to an independent moral standard, which tribalism is not. Palestinian rights do not and should not depend on whether Palestinians having rights is good for Israelis or Jews. Beinart mentions that oppressor groups are often reluctant to give rights to oppressed groups because they fear violent rebellion, and later debunks that idea by arguing that violent rebellion doesn’t historically ensue in societies in which this has occurred – but even if the chances of violence did rise, that would not mean that oppression should continue. To use the example of South Africa, even if political violence by Black South Africans was guaranteed to become more likely after the ending of apartheid, apartheid should still have ended.

Making the argument that we ought to give Palestinians rights because doing so benefits Israelis habituates people to thinking of Palestinian rights as a mere means to Israeli safety and not a valuable end in themselves. Strategically appealing to an illiberal audience risks catering to and legitimizing an oppressive political orientation. In arguing for Palestinian rights from the perspective of tribalism, Beinart implies that if the possibility of Palestinian violence upon their liberation becomes too high, there is reason to further delay that liberation. This argument is easily co-opted by those who can simply argue that enfranchising Palestinians is too unsafe. 

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In the past year and a half, when struggling to understand how many of the people in my life could maintain their Zionism in the face of genocide, I’ve clung to one explanation as if to a tree branch in a flood: generational difference. Beinart touched on this in 2010, and Ezra Klein wrote an op-ed about it in the New York Times in 2024. According to Klein’s numbers, 70% of those 65 and older supported sending American aid to Israel, while 55% of people 18 to 29 opposed it. There are similar divides on the question of whether people sympathize more with Israelis or Palestinians, whether Israel should end its military campaign in Gaza, and whether Israel was seriously interested in peace. When trying to understand why generational divides on Israel were so stark, Klein (and Beinart) arrived at the conclusion that people’s enduring perceptions of Israel are shaped by the political situation of Israel in their youth. Those 65 and older, according to Klein, remember the “impossibility and wonder” of Israel’s creation. They remember real, credible threats to Israel, they remember genuine efforts at peace, they knew Holocaust survivors intimately, and they have been more proximate to real, violent antisemitism than their offspring, mercifully, will ever be.

I have only ever known Netanyahu, who has been consistently in power since I was 9 years old. My youth was characterized by the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, by Israel’s violent suppression of peaceful Palestinian protests, by Trump’s relocation of the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, by the genocidal rhetoric of the Likud government, and now, by the destruction of Gaza.

My parents are not yet 65, but they’re close. And in my family in particular, there could not be a deeper chasm between my parents’ youthful experiences with Israel and my own. When she was 18, my mother took a gap year between high school and college – in her telling, before the term “gap year” even existed – to live in Israel, where she learned to speak Hebrew. When she returned to the US, she earned degrees in Middle East studies and learned to speak Arabic. In the 90s, she became a personal assistant to Uri Savir, the chief Israeli negotiator of the Oslo Accords. I share a name with his daughter, Maya Savir, who famously became friends with the chief Palestinian negotiator Abu Alaa’s daughter Mona during the accords. (In an op-ed from 1995, Thomas Friedman wrote that peace in Israel-Palestine would only persist if there were enough “Monas and Mayas” to sustain it.) Maya later became a human rights activist for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. 

My mother has seen, more closely than I likely ever will, real efforts at peace in Israel-Palestine. She has participated in them. She fell in love with an Israel that is radically unfamiliar to me now and believes in a peaceful, more equitable future for Israel that I believe has been rendered impossible by Israel and America’s rightward drift. While my mother’s proximity to Israel is unique, her perspective, among others of her generation, is not. Their hope has ossified into a Zionism that is unresponsive to Israel’s transformation over the past half century; it is anachronistic, blinding them to the reality of Israel today and the shrinking range of its possible futures. I wonder what it would have been like to grow up seeing what they saw or working toward what my mother worked toward. I wonder if I would see things differently now.

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“In a land where zealots set the tone, everything is judged with respect to eternity, and anything can be justified in the name of divinity.”

Beinart returns again and again to this idea of blindness. In his interview in the Guardian, he said that he knows many people for whom, “when it comes to the question of Gaza, and more generally the question of Palestinians and their right to be free, a certain set of blinders come down.” In Being Jewish, he describes the friend to whom the first chapter is addressed as blind, mentions that an addiction to victimhood “cloud[s] our vision,” argues that Jews are unable to “look Gaza in the eye,” and describes the accusation that criticisms of Israel are antisemitic as a way of “avert[ing] one’s eyes.” One wonders whether Zionists don’t merely need glasses. 

I don’t necessarily agree that all Zionists are merely blind and that, were they to open their eyes and hearts to Palestinian suffering, everything would change; a quick scan of Israeli social media channels should disabuse anyone of that notion. Zionism is a vessel: for some people, the “Zionists of refuge,” it is a vessel for fear of another Holocaust; for others, it is a vessel for the hope for peace. But for many, Zionism is a vessel for naked racism and a colonial ideology that remains persistent if tactfully euphemistic. Beinart himself argues that Zionism can be a vessel for a Jewish supremacy that deposits Jews at the top of a racial hierarchy and falsely positions us as the rightful rulers of Israel-Palestine. Some Zionists are not just blind, but malicious; some do look, but just don’t care. Beinart describes Zionists’ attitudes as such: “no matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite.” This echoes what Maya Savir wrote about Israeli policy with regard to Palestinians: “In a land where zealots set the tone, everything is judged with respect to eternity, and anything can be justified in the name of divinity.”

Though I am attempting to understand the origins of my community’s Zionism, I also hesitate to argue that anyone’s support for a Jewish state can be rooted in the hope for a peaceful future. Even before 1948, Jewish settlers have dispossessed Palestinians of ancestral land and have visited unspeakable acts of violence upon them that are wildly disproportionate to anything Palestinians have done to Israelis. No matter how seemingly liberal the conditions under which someone’s Zionism was forged, no matter how realistic the prospect of peace in their youth, supporting Israel at any time has entailed minimizing those atrocities. Even if we assume the best possible intentions, all Zionism still requires a degree of blindness.

And even if Zionists are merely blind, even if we concede the dubious suggestion that some of that blindness can be chalked up to echo chambers and a lack of easy access to information, that still does not absolve them. As Hannah Arendt wrote in the always-trenchant analysis in Eichmann in Jerusalem, 

Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, [Eichmann] had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man — that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.

Evil is banal, Arendt observes, when it is committed due to “thoughtlessness,” due to “remoteness from reality.” The banality of Eichmann’s evil could not diminish its moral weight. Eichmann was evil not because he had evil instincts but because he was blind; he never paused to look beyond the surface of what he was asked to do, or what he was told to believe. 

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There’s a tendency on the left, a tendency I’m undoubtedly feeding by comparing Zionists to Adolf Eichmann, to condemn all Zionists as bad people. But I can’t do it. For many Jews – including me – labeling all Zionists bad people entails labeling many, if not most, members of one’s community, including many members of one’s own family, bad people. These are people who we have witnessed commit acts of immense altruism, who have raised us and cared for us and cooked for us and sat shiva with us and prayed with us. Their blindness is devastating. It is antithetical to so much of who we know them to be. I still hope, perhaps naively, that the antidote to banal evil is education, that those who commit evil acts can be redeemed, that they can be wrenched back from the precipice of illiberalism and racism and endorsement of genocide if they just listen. I remember the opening prayer of Kol Nidre: “anu matirin l'hitpaleil im ha'avaryanim” – we ask permission to pray with those who have transgressed.

Beinart captures something important about the moral weight of Israel-Palestine. Once you look, you cannot imagine how you did not before; once you look, you cannot look away. You cannot understand how the people around you could choose not to. Can they even conceive of the scale of what is being ignored? How do you deal with the people in your life who choose to look away, even now? Or those who look and are unmoved?

I know many of those people. I grew up in Beinart’s deeply Zionist community. I even attended, for elementary school, the same Jewish day school where Beinart’s children were educated. I remember sitting through a school assembly in 2008 commemorating Israel’s 60th anniversary; I remember marching in the Israel day parade and being gently warned by teachers about possible protestors; I remember whispering the words of the prayer for the state of Israel every Saturday morning. I still know every word of Ha’tikva, the Israeli national anthem. At my secular high school and college, I retained a watered-down version of the Zionist fervor of my early childhood, largely because of the strength of my connection to my Jewish community. But I began to question some of my beliefs – every Zionist parent’s nightmare about liberal secular education – when presented with fatality numbers by pro-Palestine activists in high school and college who I perceived, then, as strident and vaguely antisemitic. It became increasingly difficult to repeat the arguments with which I had been inculcated as a child: Was it true that Israel received disproportionate criticism? Was a Jewish state really the only means for my safety? 

When the death toll for Palestinians surpassed that of Israelis in the wake of October 7, I began doing research in earnest. I read; I listened to podcasts. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t painful: not only because the brutality of the history is difficult to absorb, but because I realized the scale of my own blindness. I felt a deep shame about what I had chosen to ignore, how I had brushed aside the suffering of millions of people because it contradicted beliefs I had been raised to see as fundamental truths – some of the only beliefs, in the notoriously argumentative New York Jewish community, that were rarely questioned. Once I looked, I could not imagine how I did not before. I could not look away. I reluctantly admit, though I do not think it justifies their continued ignorance, that I understand why people would be unwilling to submit themselves to that discomfort, or to risk the possibility of that shame.

I can’t help but respect and even admire Beinart’s optimism that at least some Zionists are still persuadable, that they are now where I was on October 7th, but have somehow managed to cling to their blindness through the maelstrom of media coverage. There are the parents who are unable to bear the sight of dead or injured Palestinian children on their phones, despite their inability to forget the vehement Zionism of Holocaust survivors. There are the devout intellectuals struggling to reconcile what they see as a theological imperative to Zionism with political beliefs that proscribe their support for an apartheid state. There are the quiet doubters, silenced by social pressure to conform to their community’s uncritical beliefs. I don’t know how many, if any, of these people still exist after October 7. If they do, I want to believe in the possibility that their minds can still be changed, that their Zionism can still – even after the destruction of Gaza – be a site of genuine conflict. Not because I think it’s justifiable to be conflicted about Israel’s destruction of Palestine, but because being conflicted is better than the alternative.

Once you look, you cannot imagine how you did not before; once you look, you cannot look away. You cannot understand how the people around you could choose not to. Can they even conceive of the scale of what is being ignored? How do you deal with the people in your life who choose to look away, even now? Or those who look and are unmoved?

I think the best way to use this book is not as a means to persuade Zionists, but as a guide for those of us who are pro-Palestine but remain connected to communities that are still largely Zionist. It gives us talking points, and it helps us understand, if only tangentially, the psychology and history of those we are trying to convince. It’s surprising that only once in the book does Beinart explicitly entreat his readers to talk to each other: when discussing how Jewish college students raised in pro-Israel environments may feel alienated from campus spaces for their pro-Israel views, Beinart advises that “the best way to convince Jewish students that their safety does not require Jewish supremacy is not to stigmatize them. It’s to talk to them.” This, I think, should have been the framing of the book rather than odd appeals to Jewish tribalism: This book will help you talk to people. Here is what you should say.

There is a Jewish story I thought of frequently when reading On Being Jewish. It appears nowhere in the Torah; I don’t know where it comes from, but my mother’s best friend, a rabbi and brilliant storyteller, tells it every year on the High Holidays. It goes like this: A prince runs away from home after a spat with his father, the king. He spends many years in exile. One day, the prince becomes homesick, regretting his decision to leave his family so long ago. He sends word to the king: “I am ready to return, but I have gone too far, and I don’t have the energy to make it all the way home.” And the king sends word back: “Come as far as you can, and however far you get, I will meet you there.” 

Beinart’s book is flawed and addressed to an audience that won’t read it. But unlike someone like me, who has thrown their hands up in frustration at the difficulty of arguing with Zionists, he’s at least trying actively to engage those in conflict. Despite my pessimism about Zionists’ persuadability, I know that Beinart is right: there is no other way but persuasion. Beinart’s writing reflects a grief I feel not only for the tens of thousands of Palestinians slaughtered by Israel but also for the moral decline of people I love. He is willing to forgive, and to welcome them back into the familial fold, no matter how many years of estrangement pass. He is trying to meet them as far as they are able to go.