Peter Beinart Discusses Jewish Discourse Around Political Loyalty to the State of Israel
On April 7, 2025, Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School hosted a book talk as part of its 2024–25 Religion, Conflict, and Peace Book Series. Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza posits a set of ethical and political ruptures confronting Jewish identity in the shadow of Israel’s war in Gaza. Author Peter Beinart joined Professor Shaul Magid for a conversation that unfolded not as a debate, but as a shared effort to consider the consequences of occupation and as an attempt to surface the historical and political dynamics that have shaped Jewish discourse around Israel, particularly for younger generations.
Beinart maintained that any meaningful analysis of the entire situation must begin with the legal and political inequality of Palestinians. Citing Gaza’s demographics, Beinart told the audience that most of its residents are refugees from villages that are now inside Israel, with many Palestinians living in sight of the places from which they were displaced. Without acknowledging this history, he insisted, narratives about security or terrorism remain incomplete. “It seems to me one has to understand these things,” he explained. “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.” However, he continued, “if your analysis of Israel and Palestine is about Israel and Hamas, you have some trouble explaining what happened before 1987, when there was also Palestinian armed resistance.” Beinart then went on to note that much Palestinian resistance, before and after the creation of Hamas in 1987, “has been nonviolent.”
Beinart’s arguments constituted a broad critique of Israeli nationalism and its underlying logic “It’s a cliché almost,” he asserted, “but Israel’s view has always been: how can you have as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible.” His concern with structural domination in Israel shaped Beinart’s reflections on current debates about Jewish identity, particularly in the American context. Beinart described a shift away from political consensus, especially among the younger Jewish population. “I don’t think there is a consensus anymore,” he said. “Certainly not among people under the age of 40.” The tension, he argued, lies between those forces that seek to collapse the boundary between Jewishness and political loyalty to the state of Israel and those that insist on differentiating between the two.
Beinart sees a narrowing definition of Jewishness as having tangible consequences, particularly for Jewish students involved in Palestine solidarity work. He referenced recent moments when students built sukkahs during Sukkot to express solidarity with Gaza and “the universities dismantled the sukkahs. They literally sent people with hammers to break them down.” Rather than defend students’ religious expression, he lamented, major Jewish organizations applauded the crackdowns. Such episodes, for Beinart, informed his understanding of the current expectation and classification of Jewishness. The fracturing of the political consensus around the war, in Beinart’s telling, has initiated a “redefinition of what it means to be a Jew.”
Read the full transcript of this event here.