LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Over his lifetime, Peter Beinart went from being a fierce defender of Israel to one of its fiercest critics. In his latest book, the professor of journalism and political science makes an appeal to other American Jews in the wake of the war in Gaza. It's called "Being Jewish After The Destruction Of Gaza: A Reckoning." The book begins with a note to his former friend.
PETER BEINART: (Reading) I know you believe that my public opposition to this war, and to the very idea of a state that favors Jews over Palestinians, constitutes a betrayal of our people. When I enter a synagogue, I am no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away. Maybe you feel a similar anxiety in progressive circles where you once felt at home. Jews have always quarreled, and we should. But I worry that given the trajectory of events in Israel and Palestine, we may be moving past mere disagreement, toward hatred.
FADEL: Why did you open the book this way?
BEINART: Because the book really came out of my struggles over the last year and a half, in some ways longer, with a community that I love, that is at the center of my life and where I have many of my closest friendships. But from which I feel sometimes profoundly at odds, because people who I respect and love seem to me to be able to look away from the horrors of what Israel is doing to Palestinians and justify those. And so I wanted to write to those people.
FADEL: Now, you've been a very public critic of Israeli policies, Israel's occupation, for many years. Can you talk about the way your views changed?
BEINART: Sure. I grew up, in many ways, not differently than many, many American Jews in a family in which Israel's existence gave us a sense of comfort and security. But it was only late in my life, in my 30s, that I spent time with Palestinians in the West Bank. And one of the things that always has stuck with me was when I was talking with a Palestinian mother and she told me that when she had a boy, her daughters started to cry. And they were crying because in their town, boys throw stones sometimes at Israeli soldiers. And the Israeli military comes in in the middle of the night to people's homes.
They don't really necessarily know who threw the stones, but they'll take the teenage boys, screaming out of their homes, hold them often in solitary confinement for a day or two or even more. And I just thought, what is it like to live with this kind of fear? And I have been raised to think so much about our fear and our trauma as Jews, and I really hadn't thought about the kind of trauma and fear that Palestinians experience.
FADEL: Now, you address this in your book, but there are going to be people that listen to what you said who bristle at this and say, what about the violence that Jewish people in Israel have suffered - suicide bombings, the October 7 attack on Israel.
BEINART: I want to make it clear that when I talk about the conditions that exist of oppression for Palestinians, it does not justify attacking civilians and taking civilian life. But to me, if one wants to keep Israeli Jews safe, one has to think about the underlying conditions in which the terrible violence that happened on October 7 occurred, if you're going to keep it from happening again. Most of the Palestinians under Israeli control - those in the West Bank and Gaza and east Jerusalem - live as permanent, stateless noncitizens under a state for whose government they cannot vote in the West Bank under military law, even though their Jewish neighbors live under civil law.
The United Nations said Gaza was unlivable before this war. Yes, Hamas was authoritarian and often incompetent. But when you block people off from the rest of the world in a space roughly the size of an American city, you're imposing tremendous, tremendous violence on them.
FADEL: You also write about right after October 7 in the attack on Israel, scouring anti-war essays and speeches for outrage over the murder of innocent people, hundreds of Israeli civilians, and you don't find them. Was that hard? I mean, that's also a community that you belong to and are a part of. And including it in the book, what was that message?
BEINART: Yes, I think that sometimes there is a way in which in mainstream Jewish discourse, Palestinians are often dehumanized. But there is also a way sometimes in leftist discourse or anti-Israel, anti-Zionist discourse, in which Israeli Jews are dehumanized. And people say, well, they're just settlers, so they have what's coming to them. I think If this movement for Palestinian freedom is to be a great movement for justice, it cannot use that language. One can be outraged by the system of oppression that Israel maintains over Palestinians and still recognize that the lives of Israeli Jews are deeply, deeply precious and that the horrifying act that was committed against them on October 7 was the wrong way for Palestinians to resist their oppression.
FADEL: This book is an appeal, right?
BEINART: Yes.
FADEL: What is the appeal?
BEINART: The appeal is to recognize something which I think is basic in Judaism, which is that human beings are created in the image of God. And human beings, all human beings, have infinite dignity. States are mere instruments for the protection of human life, and what has happened in mainstream Jewish discourse is that the value of this Jewish state has been elevated above the value of the lives of the people under its control.
FADEL: There's a lot of people that will hear that will not like that. They'll say, you know, we need this state, and we need this place to be safe, and it needs to be for Jewish people.
BEINART: Yes. But I really believe that there can be a flourishing, vibrant Jewish Hebrew-speaking society in Israel, Palestine without a state that gives Jews rights that Palestinians don't have. And you know what the most dangerous place for Jews in the world today? It's Israel, because its political system imposes tremendous violence on Palestinians, and that makes everyone less safe.
FADEL: That was Peter Beinart, a professor and the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, on his new book "Being Jewish After The Destruction Of Gaza: A Reckoning."
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