Video: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
Peter Beinart joined us to discuss his book, "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning." In Peter Beinart’s view, one story dominates Jewish communal life: that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases the nuance of Jewish religious tradition and warps our understanding of Israel and Palestine. After Gaza, where Jewish language, history, and texts have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, Beinart argues, Jews must tell a new story and offer a new answer to the question, “What does it mean to be a Jew?”
Drawing on other nations’ efforts at moral reconstruction and a different reading of Jewish tradition, Beinart imagined an alternate narrative in which Israeli Jews have the right to equality, not supremacy, and in which Jewish and Palestinian safety are not mutually exclusive but intertwined. One that recognizes the danger of venerating states at the expense of human life.
Moderated by Shaul Magid, HDS Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies
FULL TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza-- a Reckoning, April 7, 2025.
HILARY RANTISI: I'm so delighted to see so many of you here today. My name is Hilary Rantisi, and I'm the associate director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative here at the Harvard Divinity School. I wanted to welcome you to the last of our book, new book event series, that we do in the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. We have one more event this semester at the end of April, so look out for an invitation to that and hope we see many of you there.
Before I introduce the program, I wanted to thank my colleagues, without whom arrangements for tonight's event wouldn't have been possible. So Reem, Tammy, and Natalie, Delise, Perley, and Brian behind the camera there, so please join me in thanking them.
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So some of you may be new to the Divinity School or to the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, and I just thought I'd say a few words just to introduce you to our work and to understand why this book is part of our series.
So for those of you who aren't familiar, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative centralizes an analysis of structural injustice, violence, and power in its work, and the primary case study that we've been focusing on has been on Israel-Palestine. Our aim is to stretch the scholarly discourse around religion and the practices of peace building and to examine the decolonial potentialities of art, religion, and identity transformation.
So today's book event, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza-- a Reckoning, centers an analysis of power and injustice, and it is our great honor to be hosting the author, Peter Beinart, with us today. Professor Shaul Magid will be in conversation with Peter, and I will just briefly introduce them, although I don't think they need much of an introduction.
So Peter Beinart, welcome home, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a distinguished journalist, political commentator, and professor who has become a leading voice on American politics, foreign policy, and international affairs. He's a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
He is an editor at large at Jewish Currents, a contributing opinion columnist at The New York Times, a political commentator for MSNBC, and a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He was a former editor of the New Republic and has written for the Time Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, among many other publications. He has published four books, the Good Fight-- Why Liberals-- and Only Liberals-- can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, published in 2006--
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I had to list it-- the Icarus Syndrome-- a History of American Hubris, 2010. I think everyone knows these books. I don't need to do this introduction. The Crisis of Zionism in 2012, and today he'll be discussing his latest and fourth book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza-- a Reckoning, which was just released this past January.
Peter will be in conversation with rabbi and professor Shaul Magid, who's a visiting professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, a distinguished fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth University, and a former fellow, faculty affiliate, at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. He's also prolific and has written many books, the latest of which is the Necessity of Exile, which was published in 2023.
So I am so delighted to introduce both our guests here tonight, and I know they will have an amazing conversation, and we will open up for questions at the end. We have books for sale, so I encourage you all to get a book before they all disappear. And there's food. There will be food afterwards, as well, for those of you who didn't get a chance to get some before. So please join me in welcoming our guests tonight.
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SHAUL MAGID: Thank you. Thank you, Hilary. Can everybody hear me OK? OK. Great. Sometimes a book is more than a book, and I think in this case, this book is more than a book. And I want to just tell you a very quick anecdote before we start.
But I want to say that this book really is a moment. It's an intervention, it's a provocation, and it's also an invitation. And I think that before I start, just as a caveat, I'm sure that there will be things that will be said in the next hour or so that people will disagree with, people may find offensive, one way or the other.
And I think that the importance of this book as an event, as a moment, is that it does elicit a certain kind of reaction that can be part of a conversation. So I hope that we can have that conversation.
So the anecdote is as follows. I posted the poster of the book on my Facebook page, which was, in some sense, a mistake because I immediately was attacked by myriad people from all over the world.
At which point I said-- and mostly critical, I will say-- at which point, I said, how many of you have actually read the book? After which there was silence. And one person, who I actually know from many years ago from Israel, said, I was just critiquing the description on the poster.
And I think that speaks in a way to something about the book, that the opposition, the resistance to the book, is not what's inside it, but it's that it exists at all. And that's, I think what is so important about the book, not that what's inside, it is not important too, but that it exists at all.
I think part of the punch of the book is that it combines, I think, very definitely, investigative journalism, opinion journalism, and autobiography. It's able to weave together bringing home the receipts as an investigative journalist does, a very kind of acute and sharp analysis, which Peter does brilliantly in the book.
And also it gives you a sense of the author and your life, both your past in South Africa and in America, and what it means to be a white South African, what it means to be an American. And so altogether, it really kind of combines those three things in a way that's very powerful and also, I think, very disturbing for some.
So I want to-- I have four or five questions, and I want to let you also just kind of riff on things that are happening in these walls, if you would like. And I want to begin with a question. I've listened to a lot of-- I've listened to some of the podcasts. I've listened to your Substack.
I've read the reviews, and a lot of them really are focusing on very here and now, on-the-ground questions, either questioning your assumptions or your data. But buried in the book are also a series of conceptual ideas, and I'd like to really engage those ideas, because those ideas, I have not seen.
So on page 68, you write as follows. "Israel doesn't have a Hamas problem. Israel has a Palestinian problem. Its problem is that Israeli security and Palestinian security are interconnected." Something very suggestive about that sentence, and I want to maybe offer some historical context to get a better sense of what you think.
I would say that the problem of our moment post-October 7 in the midst of a war is not only a problem of Hamas, and it's not only a problem of the Palestinians. It's a problem of what the Zionists early on formulated as the Arab question.
In the 1920s, when Jews were immigrating to Palestine and had in their minds to create the state, they had a problem. How are we going to create this Jewish state with this majority of non-Jews, Palestinians, Arabs? They weren't called Palestinians at that point, at least not by the Jews. And that was a problem of majoritarianism. The state was founded. Jews became the majority. But that problem was that-- that problem remained, and that problem remains to this day.
So I'd like to-- if you could just tell us something about what you think about this notion of the Arab question, and where it is now, and what the possibilities are moving forward?
PETER BEINART: Sure. Can you hear me? Thank you. Well, first of it, I'm really, really grateful to Hilary, and Reem, and everyone who made this possible, and I want to talk a little bit at some point about what I feel like is like the profound injustice of the fact that I'm here giving a talk under the auspices of a program invited by someone who, for reasons that seem to me completely unjust and indefensible, are actually going to be shut down. So I guess I'll lay that as a marker for the conversation as we go forward. Sorry. It's not coming through? OK.
SHAUL MAGID: You can just hold the mic. Yeah.
PETER BEINART: Yeah. Maybe I'll hold it. Is this better? No? Maybe it's not working.
SHAUL MAGID: Maybe it's not on. Did you check if it's on?
PETER BEINART: Oh. How's this? Is this better? Oh, OK. All right. Sorry.
SHAUL MAGID: First problem solved.
PETER BEINART: Yeah. I feel like that. Yeah. I've never been good with mechanical objects. It's an obscure Woody Allen reference, but the-- also, I'm just really, really grateful to be here with Shaul, who's a friend and a teacher.
And my mother is here, which is very significant to me, and also my beloved former professor, Diana Wiley, who's here, is very, very meaningful to me. And lastly, Aron Wander, who was my colleague working on the book, who really, a tremendous amount of what's in the book really owes to him. And the other extraordinary young person I worked with on the book, Na'ama ten Brink. So I'm just very, very grateful, and so it's meaningful to me to be here.
And like Shaul was saying, I'm also just very conscious when I look out into a crowd like this, that I don't want to make the assumption that folks here necessarily agree with me. And so I'm always really touched and moved when people who strongly disagree come to listen, because as Shaul was saying, often, people don't listen.
And that's not a right wing problem. That's just an American or a human problem. People just kind of often much prefer to listen to people who are going to tell them what they already believe than people who don't. So if you're one of those people who's actually coming and suspects you're going to hear a lot of things you disagree with, I'm very, very grateful to you for doing that.
It says in Pirkei Avot, who is wise, the one who learns from all people, which is a line I quote a lot because I like it a lot, and because it's something that I aspire to and often fail to achieve, to do myself.
On the question of the Palestinian problem, to me, I feel like so much discourse in mainstream Jewish circles and in mainstream American political circles about Palestinians, about Gaza, about October 7, about all kinds of things, just doesn't engage at any point with some very basic foundational truths, without which it doesn't seem to me you're going to get anywhere good in trying to understand what's happening.
And one of those truths is that between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Jews all have citizenship. They all have the right to vote for the government that has life and death control over them. They all live under civil law with due process, and they all have free movement, that most of the Palestinians under Israeli control, those in the West Bank, and Gaza, and East Jerusalem don't have any of those things.
Certainly in the West Bank, they live under military law, even as their Jewish neighbors live with due process under civil law. In the West Bank, they need military permission to travel. They can't vote for a government that has dominion, obviously dominion, over them.
I love people always saying-- somehow, people think that Palestinians in the West Bank are governed by the Palestinian Authority. Well, tell that to the Palestinian Authority when the Palestinian Authority's own officials get thrown into Israeli jails, the Palestinian Authority's own officials need Israeli military permission to travel. Israel can go-- the IDF goes regularly into any square inch of the West Bank area, A, B, C, if there were D, E, and F, every single square inch of the West Bank, any time it wants, and arrest anywhere it wants.
These mass expulsions that are now happening in Jenin refugee camp, what part of the West Bank is that? That's area A. It's supposedly the area the Palestinian Authority controls. Well, not very much, evidently, because Israel just goes in there and basically evicts tens of thousands of people.
And in Gaza, people live under the control of the state, the state of Israel. There was this idea that people had that people were not under the control of the state of Israel before October 7, but that was clearly not true.
Israel controls the population registry in Gaza, which means that for any person or good to go in and out of Gaza, on October 6, Israel had to approve it. You could try to smuggle things in, but basically, as people said, it was a prison.
It was like a prison where the prison guards had left the prison, so there were no longer settlers or soldiers on the ground before October 7. But it was still a prison in the sense that Israel controlled everything that went in and out. Now, Egypt had a subordinate role, but even at the Rafah Crossing which borders with Egypt, Israel had significant control in terms of when it went in and out.
So this just basic foundational reality about the legal regime that exists, it seems to me, the starting point, you have to think about violence, to think about morality, to think about how to make people safer. You have to engage with this question.
And you have to engage with the question that there have been these mass expulsions of Palestinians in 1948, again in 1967. And you can't make any sense of Gaza, what Gaza is, without understanding that most of the people in Gaza are not from Gaza. They're people whose families were expelled from what's now Israel.
And many of them live so close to the places from which they were expelled that they can actually see those places as they live in this incredibly overcrowded area half the size of New York City and they can see this much less crowded, much, much, much more prosperous area on the other side of the barbed wire, which is where they used to live.
So it seems to me one has to understand these things. And that's when I say that Israel doesn't have a Hamas problem. It has a Palestinian problem. It's not to say that I don't think that things Hamas has done are terrible. I think Hamas committed war crimes on October 7.
I'm fundamentally opposed to the targeting of civilians for any reason, regardless of justification. I think those are war crimes. I think they're immoral, and Hamas did it before October seven. I happen to have a college classmate who was blown up in a Hamas bus bombing in the mid-1990s. Hamas did it in the 1990s. They did it in the 2000.
But Hamas was only created in 1987. So if your analysis of the Israel and Palestine is about Israel and Hamas, you have some trouble explaining what happened before 1987, when there was also Palestinian armed resistance. There was all kinds of Palestinian resistance before 1987, as after 1987.
A lot of it has been nonviolent. We have a long history of Palestinian boycotts, of Palestinians writing letters, of Palestinians appealing to international institutions, of Palestinians doing general strikes. There's been Palestinian armed resistance against soldiers, and there's been Palestinian armed resistance against civilians.
And that didn't start with Hamas. In fact, one of the reasons the Israeli government was actually fairly sympathetic to Hamas in the late 1980s when Hamas was created was they couldn't imagine anything worse than the PLO. They couldn't do anything worse than Fatah and leftist groups like the PFLP, because those groups had been involved in armed resistance, including armed resistance against civilians.
Who did the Munich massacre, the Olympics attack? Who did the Ma'alot massacre in the 1970s, the airplane hijacks? None of this was Hamas. These were not Islamists. Hamas didn't exist. Israel thought the Islamists were the moderates.
So this to me is part of just like the problem that we have in so much of the discourse, is it doesn't get at that. So then the question is, well, how is Israel going to destroy Hamas? And I can't believe that in the mainstream Jewish discourse that I listened to and you listen to, political discourse, this is still the discourse now. Now Israel is really going to destroy Hamas.
First of all, Hamas recruits its fighters, as far as I know, from what I've read, from the families of people that Israel has killed. So yes. Israel has killed a lot of people in Hamas. It's also created the biggest recruitment bonanza that Hamas could have imagined.
And from people I know who know Gaza much better than me, they also say that although Israel has destroyed huge amount of Hamas weaponry, that Hamas is also getting its weaponry, is coming from the bombs and ordinances that Israel has dropped on Gaza, which Hamas will now repurpose, just like-- this is how the Viet Cong fought the United States and Vietnam too. Where were they getting all these weapons? They were our weapons.
And even if you could destroy Hamas, even if Hamas didn't cease to exist, you really think that Palestinians would not create some other vehicle to fight against you if you're holding them under conditions that even Israel's own human rights organizations call apartheid, and a condition in Gaza that now Human Rights Watch and Amnesty in slightly different ways have both categorized as genocide?
You think if Hamas wasn't there, that all these people who've seen their families killed-- now Gaza, as our colleague, Ahmed Moura, has written, has more child amputees than any other place in the world. You think people won't want to fight you but under some other label or organization?
It seems to me the fundamental question is, if you don't want people to fight you and kill Israelis, because I know Shaul and I very, very profoundly don't want any Israelis to die, just like we don't want any Palestinians to die, you have to deal with the roots of the problem, with the underlying grievances. And if you don't want people to take up arms, then show them that by not taking up arms, by resisting in another way, they can move towards gaining their freedom.
But the people in the Jewish community who denounce Palestinian armed resistance against civilians, which I also oppose, it's not like when Palestinians respond nonviolently, they say oh, terrific. That's great. We've been saying Palestinians should be Gandhis, and now, lo and behold, you have a nonviolent boycott.
You're asking for boycotts. You're going to the International Criminal Court, you're going to the UN. You're doing nonviolent marches like the Great March of Return. No. What do American politicians do? They sanction the International Criminal Court. They basically criminalize nonviolent boycotts and divestment efforts.
And then when Palestinians marched nonviolently, like they did in 2018, Israel sets up these sharpshooters on the fence, and they shoot people basically, mostly in the knees and below, and they create thousands and thousands of people who are injured for life.
This is not, it seems to me-- it's not just immoral. It's not coherent. It's not a coherent way of thinking about how to deal with the problem that you have because you are living alongside people, that you're not giving the basic rights that human beings deserve.
SHAUL MAGID: OK. Thank you for that. I want to push you back into the conceptual frame for a minute.
PETER BEINART: Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
SHAUL MAGID: And I want to ask you a question about nationalism. In the book, you quote a very famous citation from Hannah Arendt where Hannah Arendt says, Jews used to believe in God. Now they only believe in themselves.
And there's another line which you didn't quote but it reminded me of, that Hermann Cohen, the great neo-Kantian philosopher from early 20th century, also not a fan of Zionism, said, Jews used to want to save their souls. Now they only want to save their skin. And it's a very similar type of a sentiment.
And so it seems to me that part of the challenge of this which, again, was so interesting to me in reading your book and just reading other books like it, is the extent to which the challenge of Zionism as the transformation of the Jews from being a people to being a nation, and the adaptation of nationalism as one solution in a way of the Jewish problem.
My question is, does the nationalist project itself push in that direction of describing the kinds of things that you're describing, where everything becomes about the collective? Everything is about the self, and everything outside of that is just basically a utility for the survival and the protection of the self?
Now, something very understandable about this post-Shoah, people that had experienced the world's historical genocide, this is something that Hannah Arendt was saying it's not going to work out. You can't take a people that just experienced a genocide, and then put them in charge of other people, and think that something good is going to come out of that.
And there were all these experiments through the history of Zionism-- Buber's, Hebrew humanism, and all kinds of binationalism. And my question to you is, I don't believe in historical inevitability, but is there something about the very nature of the nationalist project, given the proximate history of the Jews, that pushes in that direction where we get to this point where you're basically doing the kinds of things that are happening? Like you, I don't believe that people are bombed into moderation. I don't think there's a lot of historical precedent for that. So how can it be different?
PETER BEINART: Yeah. Look. I should say, I have been thinking. I wrote in that book that I believe that Jewish, Israeli-Jewish, and Palestinian safety are intertwined and interconnected. And I said that as something I believe is a statement of fact, but it's also obviously a kind of moral principle that I believe in.
But I will say that there are times, especially in the last few months, that I've thought that maybe I am just totally wrong. And I think that what's made me think more about the possibility of being wrong is thinking more about analogies between Israel, and Palestine, and the United States in the 19th century.
Because in some ways, it actually turned out that the safety of Americans who would come to the United States or whatever in the 18th and 19th century were pushing across the American continent, and the safety of Native Americans were not actually intertwined, because the Native American population was destroyed. Not every last Native American was destroyed but destroyed as a set of peoples, and so they weren't able to wage resistance anymore.
I sometimes feel like a 19th century American watching October 7 would have felt they were seeing something very familiar to them because they would have said, oh yeah. We know exactly what this is. We have groups like Hamas because we have these Native Americans. We've pushed them off their land into these smaller and smaller areas, and we know what happens when they break out of those areas. They just killed men, women, and children.
And America didn't solve that problem without creating a two-state solution along the Mississippi River or one equal state in which there was a large Native population. It did succeed in destroying. And I guess I was, perhaps naively-- we didn't really think up until recently that that was really a possibility, but I have come to believe that it's more of a possibility than I had realized.
It is to me-- because and I've been watching the response to the-- this is a little afield from your question, but watching the response to the Trump plan just brought home to me so clearly that whatever norms of limitations that I thought existed in American Jewish discourse, in Israeli Jewish discourse, in a mainstream American political discourse, were largely kind of an illusion, because--
I remember hearing-- I saw not just Netanyahu, but I saw Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, the centrist Israeli politicians I heard Yair Golan, the head of the Democrats, which is the merger of Merits and Labor, who said the Trump plan is impractical, but it's a beautiful dream.
And then I saw many mainstream American Jewish commentators whose reaction to the Trump plan was things like, well, it's hard to see exactly how it'd work, but maybe we need creative, out-of-the-box thinking. We need some kind of new paradigm, after all. Maybe people would be better off. After all, Gaza's really so terrible.
I'm like, oh, you just realized that things in Gaza are terrible now? Because I thought the day before yesterday, you were telling me things weren't so bad. Now, all of a sudden, they're so terrible that people need to leave.
And I feel like the day before yesterday, if I had suggested that large scales of many Israeli politicians would be openly supporting mass expulsion, you would have said, how dare you slander Israel by claiming that people want forced expulsion?
But then when they want, when they embrace forced expulsion, then everyone just justifies that. It's like there's this sliding scale. And I think that to go back to your question about whether this was inevitable, I think it's a cliche almost, but the Zionist movement and then Israel's view has always been, how can you have as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible?
And so if that's your attitude, then I think that an effort to have fewer and fewer Palestinians, not just in Gaza but also in the West Bank where more and more people are being forced out of area C, and other parts of the West Bank and just crowded into smaller and smaller areas where their lives are more and more and more impossible.
A Palestinian friend of from the West Bank was just saying to me, he said something along the lines of, so many times in so many ways, the state says to me, we really rather you not be here.
And so I do think that's always been there. And I think there's something dangerous, I guess, about saying-- it's always structural. I don't know. When people are willing to say-- even Chuck Schumer in his book, he's willing to say things about Ben-Gvir and Smotrich that suggests that they're really beyond the pale. He calls them Jewish supremacists, and he says that--
But what exactly are Ben-Gvir and Smotrich wanting to do that David Ben-Gurion and a young Yitzhak Rabin didn't do in 1948? They expelled a lot more Palestinians than Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have done.
So these things are in the Israelis'-- Israel's political DNA, and I do think it goes-- it has to do with the fundamental problem of, how are you going to create a state for Jews, of Jews, by Jews, in a place where so many of the people are not Jews? You either have to get rid of a lot of them, or you have to hold them in some kind of subordinate situation. And I think Israel has-- and I think Israel has tried both of those efforts.
And now that the other solutions-- partition, which gives them their own state, now that that's really not on the table, and given that the idea of treating them equally and giving them equal citizenship is completely not on the table, I think basically the mainstream conversation is moving more and more towards, how can we find more and more-- how can we impose more and more pressure so that we have fewer Palestinians around?
And it's a horrifying thing to watch, and it's also, for me, a horrifying thing to see people justify and yet be able to have so much mainstream credibility in our community, and in American politics, and in Israel, even as they justify things that I naively thought people would simply recognize as fundamentally profoundly wrong.
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah. I was reminded when you were saying, in 1948, there was a very big debate. It was really a national debate after the establishment of the state, about whether to let many of those refugees back into the country.
And Martin Buber made a very, very, very impassioned speech to a group of people, including David Ben-Gurion, arguing that if the new country of Israel would not let those refugees back, it would be a moral stain on the country. And Ben-Gurion, who was a leftist, Ben-Gurion's response was-- as you said, literally, his response was, the fewer Arabs, the better.
PETER BEINART: Right.
SHAUL MAGID: That was the national project from the beginning. The other thing--
PETER BEINART: And so one of the things I think that-- the more successful Israel is in doing this, it seems to me, the more it becomes a template for many other governments around the world that also have disposable populations that they would also really just not like to have around.
I just always imagine like someone like Narendra Modi with his Muslim problem in India watching what Israel and saying, wow. This is an option for us. And I just fear that, and especially with the ethnic cleansing that happened in Nagorno-Karabakh of Armenians by Azerbaijan the summer of 2023, I feel like this is also just laying the foundation for a whole new era of ethnic cleansing around the world.
SHAUL MAGID: I have two questions. Maybe I'll ask them-- well, I'll ask one and then the other because they're actually quite different. There's a lot of comparison in the book. It's actually interesting not only in terms of the South African case in your own personal autobiography, and there are a lot of people who are defenders of what's going on in Israel that really try to deflect any comparison, as if to say, this is a case for which there is no comparison.
PETER BEINART: Right.
SHAUL MAGID: Now, having a son and a father-in-law who are both political scientists, political scientists cannot tolerate that, the idea that there's something that's sui generis. Now, everything is different from everything else, but everything can be compared in some way.
And it seems what comes out of your comparison is pushing back against-- I think you maybe mentioned a couple of times-- this notion of somehow Israeli exceptionalism, that Israel is an exceptional case, either because of the Holocaust or because of a variety of other things.
And I think that there's something. There's a deep fissure in the ability for the collective, many of whom want peace, many of whom want a better place, many of whom recognize the rights of self-determination, but because it's embedded in this exceptionalism, it almost prevents any kind of movement towards a resolution, because any time you compare it, whether it's Ireland or whether it's South Africa, there's always going to be the attempt to say, no. This is different, and therefore those solutions could never work in this case.
PETER BEINART: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I wanted to try to write about in the book, which is especially to a Jewish audience, was just to try to get across the idea that other groups of people who had legal supremacy were also really terrified that this sense that Israeli Jews have and many, many non-Israeli Jews have that, it's just obvious that if you got rid of this system of legal supremacy, that your life would be in grave danger.
It's so obvious that when people challenge it, you look at them like they're nuts, which is the way people look at me sometimes, that I just want to try to make the point that that's not unique to Jews, and it's not uniquely a product of the history of anti-Semitism and the Shoah, that it's actually maybe pretty typical of people who become accustomed to legal supremacy, that they associate equality with death, or at least with subjugation, that that is a really--
You have a lot of white American discourse in the 19th century which basically says basically, if we don't have slaves, we will be the slaves. That was a really typical thing to say in 19th-century America.
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.
PETER BEINART: And I was really-- and as you know, I spent part of my childhood in South Africa, so I was surrounded by people for whom the idea that you could have a free election, which would bring a Black majority government and they could still be safe, was just considered absurd. It was just considered absurd.
And I think that part of the problem is now we look back in these moments, and we think, oh, those benighted racists. We can't imagine they were just such idiots and they were so profoundly immoral, but when you're in that discourse, it seems completely plausible. And it was plausible for Protestants in Northern Ireland too, which I quote Ian Paisley, the Protestant leader, who says on the eve of the Good Friday Agreement, "this is a prelude to genocide."
Protestants were terrified of the IRA, and they hated the IRA with a burning amount of passion. They had seen the IRA doing terrible, terrible things, killing lots and lots of people, killing civilians. White South Africans were terrified of the ANC.
Growing up, I literally even never heard the term. I remember almost was feeling like I never heard the term, African National Congress, without the adjectives, communist terrorist before it. We forget that part. But it was communist-- they were getting their weapons from the Soviet Union, and they were considered a terrorist organization by the United States, and they were using armed resistance.
It's only the American discourses turned Nelson Mandela into Martin Luther King or Gandhi. He wasn't. He was actually one of the people who moved the ANC away from nonviolent resistance. They believed in armed resistance.
And so the logic was, listen. Maybe our system of supremacy is not pretty. Maybe it's not great. Maybe in some distant future, it would be better if we had some situations. But in this here and now, people are trying to kill us. They're obviously clearly trying to kill us. The reason that they're not able to kill us is that we have this defense. We have this shield of the state.
And now you, in your ivory tower, a liberal somewhere-- this is the way white South Africans looked at the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. I remember it because I was in high school and in college with these anti-apartheid activists.
And then I would go to talk to my relatives in South Africa, and they'd be like, these people seriously want us to take away the thing which is protecting our lives and put ourselves at the mercy of these people who we have evidence are trying to kill us? Why on Earth would we do that?
And I think the reason that those white South Africans, and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and white Americans turned out to be wrong, is that they were not really seeing those people on the other side of the divide truly as human.
And they couldn't really understand that this violence was a response to a system of violence, which was what Martin Luther Martha King was trying to say again, and again, and again. Every time there was violence-- there were riots in major cities, and he would say, listen. You can't see this in isolation. You can't see this-- and if you see it in isolation, you're going to be basically involved in a discourse of racist discourse, in which, this is just the way Black people are.
And so I feel like it turned out that once Black people in South Africa got the vote, they had a mechanism for government to be responsive to them, and Mkhonto Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, didn't need to exist.
And that the IRA stopped blowing things up, not because everyone in the IRA were such nice people, by the way. They really weren't all such nice people, but because they had a mechanism which didn't put their lives at risk in which they could actually advocate for a meaningful-- for having a decent life.
And I get so frustrated-- you've heard this line I'm sure all the time that I do where people will say to me, Peter, what you're saying is really nice in the abstract, but you just don't understand that Israel is in the Middle East.
Which reminds me so much of the way white South Africans talked about Africa, which was also, by the way, Africa in the 1980s, if you look north of the Limpopo River, didn't look like the countries were thriving that much. It looked like a bunch of dictatorships, and civil wars, and corrupt, dysfunctional places. And so it wasn't looked like you would look at Congo, or Zimbabwe, or Nigeria, and Kenya, and say, this is a glittering future for us.
And I was really struck reading the book by how much Protestants in Northern Ireland saw Catholic Ireland in similar ways to the way so many Jews see the Arab world and so many white South Africans saw the African continent as this sea of backwardness and savagery.
But I just never heard a Black South African say, you have to understand. We're in Africa. And I never hear Palestinians say, you have to understand. We're in the Middle East.
And it's not because Palestinians look at Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, and Iraq, and think these countries are fabulous models of what they want. It's just that they have an understanding of why there may be a lot of corruption, and dictatorship, and violence, which is not basically based on some essentialized, racist view of, well, that's just the way these people are.
They can see that it has to do with the legacy of colonialism, and it has to do with the legacy of the Cold War. And partly, we don't have democracies in the Middle East because America doesn't want to have democracies in the Middle East and a whole series of things, and so it doesn't lead you to this place.
And so I feel like to me, that's the value of sometimes, in this Jewish, trying to deexceptionalize the Jewish and Israel conversation, and then be able to imagine us in the position of these other peoples, and then maybe be able to imagine us in a way, in the places that they are now, where they're no longer in supremacist systems, and not everything is perfect, but they're not actually in grave danger, and they're actually grateful for the most part that they're no longer living in supremacist systems.
SHAUL MAGID: Right. Well, I want to pull you from Ireland, South Africa, Israel, Palestine, to America, and I want to ask two final questions about America and Jews in America and what I see, at least from where I sit, a pretty serious-- I wouldn't call it a generation gap. It's more like a generation rupture-- that's happening.
And the two questions are as follows. There seems to be an unspoken fusion between Zionism and Jewishness in America that has developed over the last half century in all kinds of ways. And I think that what October 7 and the war has shattered that fusion, or at least pressed very hard against it, and then there's obviously a lot of reaction back.
So my question is, is that what you would call the Zionist consensus or what sociologists call the Zionist consensus, which really happens in America in the 1970s, post-'67, and then post Yom Kippur war, that the Zionist consensus is over? That's a question, not a statement.
And by that, I don't mean that Americans won't be Zionists. What I mean is that when we talk about a Zionist consensus, we're really talking about a kind of liberal Zionist consensus, and that it seems to me what's happened is that's collapsed. The middle has collapsed, and that people have moved to the right or to the left, and there's this kind of empty space.
So I wanted to ask you to weigh in on that because it seems to me that-- again, from where I sit, American Jewry is broken right now. There's a rupture. People can't talk to each other. They can't talk to each other about Israel. They can't talk to each other about anti-Semitism. They can't talk to each other about the American political system. Something is deeply, deeply-- has deeply kind of shaken the entire American Jewish community that has existed fairly stable for the last half century.
So if you could kind of speak to that, and is there somewhere it can go? That came out in the Jewish left conferences at BU in a number of ways. The emergence of the term, anti-Zionism, as a functioning term that didn't exist two years ago, three years ago?
PETER BEINART: Yeah. So I do think that there is not a Zionist, if by Zionist, we mean a support for a state that gives Jews legal supremacy over Palestinians. I do think that consensus has really eroded, and I don't think there is a consensus anymore, and there's certainly not a consensus among people under the age of 40.
And one of the things, one of the problems we have, is that the people who tend to do polling about this tend to generally be from the mainstream Jewish organizations that are really, really interested in showing that there is this consensus. But actually, if you look at what happens when people ask slightly more different kinds of questions, you actually see these things are really exposed really clearly.
So in 2021, we had a poll which showed that 38% of American Jews under the age of 40 think Israel's practicing apartheid. And then last year, we had a poll which said that 30% of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide, and--
SHAUL MAGID: Under 40, the under 40.
PETER BEINART: I know it was 30 overall, and under 44, it was 38%. So these are not positions that the organized American Jewish community thinks are wrong. These are positions that the organized American Jewish community thinks are prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism.
So in a strange way, I think if the organized-- if the American Jewish establishment were being honest, they would say, we have a very serious anti-Semitism problem amongst young American Jews, because many, many of them are expressing positions that we now consider anti-Semitic.
And Mira Chukhrov, our friend, basically did this. She went-- she did this smart thing where she just didn't ask American Jews if they were Zionists, but she gave different definitions of Zionism. And so when she asked American Jews, do you consider yourself a Zionist if it means that Jews have rights that are superior to Palestinians? Most said no. So it actually suggests that there's a lot more fragility to this supposed consensus than people would suggest.
I think though, what seems to me to be happening, and I'm actually writing something about this now, is that as more and more Jews defect from-- let's just, political Zionism, from the idea of a Jewish state, what's happened is deeply embedded in American discourse has been the equation of being Jewish and being pro-Israel or being Zionist.
And so actually, I think the way the political system is metabolizing this. And the way the organized American Jewish community is metabolizing this is, in fact, if you leave the Zionist consensus, you actually aren't Jewish anymore.
And Trump said this in his own particularly depraved way when he said that Chuck Schumer is not a Jew. He's a Palestinian. Now, what did he mean by that? He meant to be Jewish is to be supportive of Israel to a certain level, and Schumer dipped below that, so congratulations. He's now Palestinian.
But I don't think Trump came up with this on his own. Trump was-- he was very crudely restating something which is very common in mainstream American Jewish discourse, which is to say, if Jewishness and Zionism are inseparable, then if you're not a Zionist, you're actually not really Jewish.
And I think that actually, if you look at the way-- again, I'm writing about this, but if you look at the way that people respond to what happens on college campuses, this actually is what happens, because-- so for instance, I went looking for this piece I'm writing to try to figure out how many sukkahs had been forcibly dismantled by college administrations last fall.
And it turns out they were roughly about 10. On 10 different campuses, Jews had built sukkahs, which is supposedly a good Jewish thing to do around Sukkot. It's kind of what you're supposed to do. And the universities dismantled the sukkahs. They literally sent people with hammers break them down.
So now, if that's all you knew about this, you might think the Anti-Defamation League would be concerned about this. This might actually even sound like-- it might sound like anti-Semitism, if Jews are not allowed to practice their core tenets of their religion.
No. The ADL was thrilled with this. The ADL was pushing for this to happen because it just happened that these were Gaza Liberation, Gaza Solidarity sukkahs, which meant that they weren't really sukkahs and that the kids, Jewish kids, who were building them weren't really Jews. So they were not classified as Jews.
So many of the kids who are now and have been getting expelled, suspended, arrested-- and the punishments are going up, and up, and up because the pressure is not just on the federal government, but it's from the organized American Jewish organizations to be harsher, and harsher, and harsher.
A remarkably high percentage of those young people are Jews. And I think it's partly because actually, they may have had a greater expectation of safety than the Palestinian, and Arab, and Muslim, and Black students, which is part of the reason they were so overrepresented in these moves, because they thought that being Jewish, and most of them would be considered white, that they actually had a safety.
What they didn't realize was that they were not going to be classified as Jews in the discourse of American politics and of the discourse of their own community. And so then when they got suspended, and expelled, and beaten up, and arrested, that the Jewish organizations would applaud, which is what they've done.
So when Columbia suspended Jewish Voice for Peace, the ADL said, we thank Columbia for keeping Jewish students safe. Well, not those Jewish students at your former campus when Dartmouth called in the New Hampshire police and they zip tied and dragged across the ground the former head of the Jewish Studies program. So this poor woman still has nerve damage from this according to this.
The ADL thanked Dartmouth for creating a climate of safety on campus. And so this, I think, is what's happened as the result of this fracturing of the consensus, is that it's meant the redefinition of what it means to be a Jew.
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah. It's captured in this article, I think it was 2022, written by Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky called--
PETER BEINART: The Un-Jew, absolutely.
SHAUL MAGID: The Un-Jew, which was published--
PETER BEINART: They were leading indicators of this. They were early to this. Right. Right.
SHAUL MAGID: Well, we're running out of time, but thank you.
PETER BEINART: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Religion and Public Life.
SPEAKER 3: Copyright 2025, President and Fellows of Harvard College.