Longtime journalist Peter Beinart on a Jewish identity that truly centers equality and freedom
I spoke with the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, a progressive magazine and "cultural Zionist" via Zoom this month.
When journalist and longtime liberal Zionist
announced in a piece in Jewish Currents in 2020 he no longer believed in a majority Jewish nation, the Associated Press described the triggering of “an earthquake in the Jewish-American world.”For 15 years, Beinart has been a leading voice for liberal Jews, especially young American Jews—struggling to reckon with the growing tension between their religious and cultural values on the one hand and the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians on the other. Beinart is an observant Jew. He has spent time in Israel and has written about how experiencing a thriving Jewish society in Israel brought joy and meaning to his own life. He has been increasingly troubled, however, by his own struggle to apply to Israel the values of justice, empathy, and equality that he views as the foundations of Judaism, a tradition based on escape from persecution and a struggle for freedom.
“Histories of suffering don’t have any self-evident political meaning,” he told me when we spoke by Zoom in early January. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was entering its fourth month. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other supporters of the war invoke the Holocaust regularly as justification for the bloody onslaught in the name of Jewish safety.
Beinart, like many prominent Jews, has also invoked Holocaust memory, but as a reason why he thinks Jews, of all people, should not visit this degree of suffering and displacement on another persecuted population. “People have to narrate those political meanings, right? And you can narrate them in very different ways,” he said.
“You can say that the lesson is human beings have obligations to one another based on our shared common humanity and that Jews, in particular, should remember that and recognize that given what we have experienced,” he said. “Or, you can say that the lesson is ‘the world is a very dark and dangerous place in which everyone has to take care of oneself. And power is all that really matters.’ There are many, many people who have gone through the Holocaust or other experiences who come to those diametrically different conclusions.”
Beinart’s views on Israel have changed over time, largely in response to his own personal circumstances that have forced him by choice farther from Jewish institutions and toward a new understanding of Jewish identity.
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He started writing about Israel 15 years ago, around the time he left The New Republic editorship, Netanyahu and Barack Obama won their respective elections and he started raising kids. Beinart was uncomfortable watching American Jews side with Netanyahu. He also worried his kids would have to choose between two worlds—religious communities where Palestinian voices did not have much space or liberal communities where religious observance not understood.
Around the same, Beinart started spending time in the West Bank, which he said was a “transformative experience” in reconsidering assumptions he had about Israel. Over time, he began engaging with “more uncomfortable questions,” including that “a two-state solution, as Jews tend to imagine it, kind of precludes […] Palestinian refugee return” and full equality for Palestinian citizens. As a Jewish voice, Beinart has centered his own storytelling on Israel around constructing an argument that one state promising equal rights is not calamitous for Israeli Jews, but, perhaps, the best, safest path forward.
After spending years advocating for a two-state solution, in 2020 he changed course and wrote a piece called “Yavne” in Jewish Currents. In his piece, he asks Jews to differentiate between the form and essence of Zionism and Jewish life. The essence of Zionism is a thriving Jewish society and a Jewish home in the land of Israel, he argues.
Yavne, as he tells it, is the story of Jews abandoning animal sacrifice in 70 CE after 1,000 years of practice. Jews had previously been worshipping God by sacrificing animals at the temple. The temple was about to fall, so the practice would soon become impossible. A rabbi asked the Roman Emperor for Yavne, or a change in Jewish practice and then Judaism grew to center on prayer and study, instead of sacrifice. If you’re not familiar with how large of a change this is, consider that, for me, a reform Jew raised in a very Jewish family, I did not know animal sacrifice had even been part of our history until I read Beinart’s piece.
Beinart centers his piece on this story because he is asking Jews, nearly 2,000 years after the original Yavne, to consider a change in Jewish identity, a move away from centering Jewish life on the existence of a Jewish majority state.
He asks readers and, more generally, the Jewish diaspora, to again acknowledge a change in the story of Jewish history—this time the change being moving away from a Jewish majority state. Instead, he described a day he hopes will come when, for example, Jewish and Palestinian co-presidents together honor Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem and gather to build a Museum of the Nakba. The Nakba or “catastrophe” in Arabic refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 war.
“I just don’t think Jews perhaps think enough about the amount of violence that they’re inflicting on Palestinians and what the consequences of inflicting that kind of violence is. Because people who have a lot of violence inflicted upon them will resist. They’ll resist in a range of ways. […] This is not unique to Palestinians,” he said.
Jews, in particular, should understand the trauma violence inflicts on not just those who live through violence but also the generations that come after. It’s not just that trauma gets literally embedded in our DNA and passed through generations. It’s also the stories we tell each other and our descendants about how we were persecuted, targeted and wronged. Those stories keep us insular and watching out for only ourselves. I’d argue the cycle of violence against Jews and the ensuing trauma and fear keeps Israel and the Jewish Diaspora from engaging fully with the understanding that we are creating those same traumas in another population.
When we look to our own history, we see violence in our struggles for freedom. As the story goes, Jews became a nation in slavery. When Jews escaped slavery in Egypt, that came with freedom yes, but also the death of every firstborn son of Egyptians (learned this one from watching The Prince of Egypt every year). Now, Passover represents freedom and the struggle of wandering the desert for 40 years before finding the land of Israel.
“There are very, very powerful messages about ideas of human dignity that exist in Judaism. The very fact that the Torah doesn’t start with Jews […] you only get to Jews in the third Parasha [weekly Torah portion],” Beinart said. “I think it makes a point about the essential universalism of the fact that all people are created in the image of God.”
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Beinart drew on comparisons between Israel and other historically divided or colonial societies, such as South Africa and Algeria to explain both his reasoning and warnings. He is the child of South African immigrants to the United States and learned both the importance of building and centering a strong Jewish life, and also the risks of maintaining a divided society.
“As I read political science literature in divided societies, you find that those societies are more peaceful for everybody when all people in a divided society have a voice in government,” he said. “When one group is locked out, they are more likely to turn to violence because they don’t have a non -violent means of getting their needs met through voting and the normal kinds of political processes.”
He pointed to South Africa and Northern Ireland as examples where, though there was fear the end of the status quo would spell danger, it actually brought more peace.
“To me, these societies, while still difficult societies, became more peaceful,” he said.
Israel’s path forward will no doubt be difficult. Some, like Beinart, no longer believe in the majority Jewish nation but do remain “cultural Zionists” or as he describes it, someone who believes in the importance of a thriving Jewish community in Israel-Palestine but doesn’t believe that it must take the form of a Jewish majority state. The term, coined by Ahad Ha’am, supports a spiritual center in Israel. In the late 1800s, Ha’am argued for “a Jewish state and not merely a state of Jews.”
Beinart engages regularly with other folks passionate about the issue and tends to steer away from terms like “Zionist” or “anti-Zionist” because the terms have taken on a life of their own and instead asks affiliates of either term “do you believe that Jews and Palestinians deserve to live in this territory equally and safely?”
“I think most Zionists, political Zionists, can’t answer yes to that question because Zionism doesn’t allow Palestinian equality. And I want anti-Zionists to […] affirm a vision of equality and co-existence.”
“There is another tradition in Palestinian nationalism, which was influenced by Algeria and imagines a kind of decolonization in which the settler leaves,” he said. “That’s not a vision that I share. I want to know what people imagine would happen to Israeli Jews in a kind of condition of decolonization once there was not a Jewish state.”
He is not a “diasporist,” which is, as he describes it, the idea “there would be no loss if all Jews were to be in diaspora and none lived in Israel-Palestine.” The Jewish diaspora is, generally, the dispersion of Jews out of Israel and re-settlement elsewhere around the globe but also represents specific instances of exile or expulsion. Jews living outside of Israel are part of the diaspora.
As we continue to wrestle with how and what it means to be Jewish in diaspora, his words have inspired me to continue thinking critically. Though the stories I learned remind us to not oppress the stranger, which Beinart describes as “foundational in Jewish law,” there are also texts “that may speak in a very, very radically tribal exclusivist and even violent and genocidal direction. […] One needs to reckon with that as well.” Most importantly, these issues represent, to me, how to live and represent a religion and culture that, I believe, is based in freedom and kindness.