Andrew Rovinsky, the Chief Operations Officer of the Brown Jewish Journal, recently spoke with journalist and Professor Peter Beinart about his upcoming book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning and other issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and institutional Jewish life. The following is a transcript of their conversation, which has been edited for clarity. The Brown Jewish Journal as an organization does not take official political stances and therefore does not endorse the views expressed in this article, but wants to continue in its mission to bring a diverse array of Jewish voices together to foster discussion in the Brown community.
Andrew: Hello, Professor Beinart, I'm going to be talking about your new book, but some readers of the Brown Jewish Journal probably don't know who you are or what you do. I was wondering if you could just tell someone who has no idea who you are, what they need to know about you, your work and the book you just wrote.
Peter: I'm a professor at City University of New York. I am also a writer. I'm an editor at large, at a publication called Jewish currents. I'm a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, and I write a newsletter called The Beinart notebook. I have written about a variety of things, but this book in particular comes out of a series of questions I've been wrestling with for a long time, which has to do with the way in which Jews think about who we are, and the way in which that has contributed to the organized American Jewish community's complicity in the oppression of Palestinians, and what it would mean to tell a different kind of story that might help move us towards mutual collective liberation of both Palestinians and Jews.
Andrew: Recently, we saw Elon Musk do a certain gesture, and I think this is particularly relevant now, especially given the ADL response to that gesture. And so I want to know: how do we fix Jewish institutional life? Is it beyond saving? Because also, there are a lot of people I know who will say “I'm not a big fan of how the ADL handles Palestine, but they're the only organization that deals with antisemitism. So I still support them, and I think they do a lot of good work.” How do you respond to that argument; how do you think Jewish institutional life can change?
Peter: Yeah, so, the first thing I would say is that I don't think, even if it was morally legitimate
to fight antisemitism, that to sequester that struggle away from struggles against other forms of bigotry and for other forms of human equality, even if we thought that was a kind of morally legitimate strategy, I think it's actually a profoundly ineffective strategy. And I think you see the ineffectiveness in the way the Anti Defamation League and other mainstream American Jewish organizations have responded to Donald Trump. Donald Trump is by far the most nakedly antisemitic president the United States has had in 50 years. He repeatedly associates with people who make crudely antisemitic comments. He himself has, has a long history of making comments about Jews that are clearly antisemitic and these views don’t exist in isolation. This is part of their larger, a larger perspective they have, an ethno-nationalist perspective, in which they believe that they are real Americans who are white and Christian, straight, etc, and everybody else is a second class citizen, a kind of a guest in the country who needs to be on their best behavior. There's nothing in the very nature of their notion of a kind of a state that is controlled by one tribe. The one way you can counter this is as part of a broader movement based on the principle of equality under the law for everybody, but the [Anti Defamation League] can't really be part of that global that broader movement, because many of those other progressive groups that want to be involved in that struggle also believe that Palestinians are among the people who deserve human equality, and the ADL is in fundamental opposition to that. It can't be part of those coalitions, and it also can't see Donald Trump in an unambiguously negative way, because it's always trying to balance the fact that Donald Trump and Elon Musk's ethnonationalism, while making them a threat to Jews in the United States, also makes them often very strong supporters of Israel. And so that's why you find the ADL in this kind of torturous position of, bending over backwards to not see antisemitism on the right, because at the core of its mission is the defense of Israel, which actually, makes it not able to effectively fight for the equality of Jews and other people in The United States.
Andrew: Do you think there are any organizations that deal with, you know, antisemitism, appropriately? I know in the book, you talk about how you think the left can do better at kind of acknowledging Zionism, acknowledging the cultural tradition of Zionism. So how can the left do better? And are there organizations that are doing that right now?
Peter: I think there are Jewish organizations that have a commitment to Palestinian freedom, you know, in different ways, whether it's, If Not Now, or Jewish Voices for Peace, or Rabbis for Human Rights, or other kinds of organizations. I think that it's an open question. I think now there's a group called the Diaspora Alliance, which is fighting antisemitism, but also opposing the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. To me, I guess what I would like to see is that there is a kind of broad struggle for Palestinian Liberation, which also imagines that as Jewish liberation. Because I think liberation of oppressed peoples also is often, in retrospect, understood as a kind of liberation of their oppressors as well, and that Jews play a very important role alongside many other groups of people in that effort, and that as part of that effort, we recognize that antisemitism is wrong because it's an affront to human equality, which is the central kind of premise. That should organize our efforts. And we [also need to] recognize that people on the left, just because they're on the left, are not somehow immune from forms of bigotry, including forms of antisemitism. Antisemitism has been around for a long time. It is a part of Western culture, so it's not surprising that that cultural inheritance could manifest itself in all kinds of ways, on the left as well as [on] the right. That's been part of the reason the Soviet Union, even though it imagined itself as a liberationist project, in what you know was often antisemitic towards its own Jewish citizens, and in the way it spoke about Jews around the world. So I think one has to be kind of vigilant about this. But I think it's important to kind of put antisemitism within a broader framework about human equality and and, and always, to be aware and and to resist the efforts to essentially turn the fight against antisemitism into a justification for bigotry against Palestinians, which is what I think the ADL and other groups do now.
Andrew: I want to kind of turn to another topic from the book that I found really interesting, Jewish ethical responsibility. My kind of question about Jewish ethical responsibility is what is the implication for our discussions around Israel-Palestine? Does that mean that Jews are ethically responsible to speak out against Israel? Or what about Jews who say, I don't want to get involved with this. I don't really want to speak on Israel-Palestine. I have a lot of friends like that who don't necessarily get involved one way or the other. So what do Jewish ethical responsibility really entail?
Peter: I do think people do have the right to be involved in the causes that speak to them, and there are obviously many other calamities that are happening in the world that people might be concerned about. I think the reason that Jews, even Jews who live outside Israel, should consider our ethical responsibilities vis a vis Israel, in addition to the fact that as Americans, we're simply complicit in it’s actions, because these are our weapons and our taxpayer dollars so that affects all Americans whether they're Jewish and non Jewish, is that this is a state whose government explicitly speaks in the name of Jews. And so if one takes seriously what it means to be Jewish, and you have a powerful state that is committing these terrible atrocities and doing so and saying it's because of your safety, it's in the name of your representation, then I think you become implicated in that story, unless you make some effort to actually disassociate yourself from it and tell a different story.
Andrew: I want to shift to another part of the book. You make a comparison to South
Africa. My question is what do you think the benefits [ and drawbacks] of comparison are?
Peter: I think comparison or analogy is inevitable. I think as human beings, we're kind of hardwired to when we see something new, to try to make sense of it by comparing it to something that we already know. And so many of the same people who are furious when Ta-nehisi Coates compares Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank to the Jim Crow South are the very same people who have no problem comparing America and Israel as countries that have shared democratic values? Or would the same people who might be furious if you, if you call Donald Trump Hitler, have no problem calling Hamas a Nazi organization? I think people are involved in these analogies all the time. The question is, which analogies make more sense and which analogies make less sense? I think every analogy needs to be critically examined, and every analogy will have some limitations. When it comes to South Africa, apartheid, South Africa and Israel, Palestine, there are very important differences between the two situations. For instance, in apartheid South Africa, the government was very dependent on black labor, and that's actually one of the things that I think gave the anti-apartheid movement its strength was that they were able to actually threaten the viability of the economy. When the black South African Trade Unions went on strike. Palestinians are much less important to Israel’s economy. Their labor is much less important in Israel Palestine, which is part of the reason, actually, that Israel has more power. One of the reasons Israel can do what it does in Gaza is that it doesn't actually need the labor of those people. In some ways, that is what makes Palestinians more disempowered than black South Africans. That's just one of many differences we could think of. But I do think that where there is, an important similarity is that you have a system in which one group has legal supremacy, and another group is legally inferior. And that the justifications around that, although today we might think we can never imagine how anybody justified apartheid in South Africa, the justifications were not as different from the justifications for Jewish supremacy in Israel-Palestine as we might think. A central justification was that if whites did not have legal supremacy, their lives would be in grave danger. The African National Congress was using violence. It was considered a terrorist organization by the United States. Some of its rivals, like the pan Africanist Congress, were even more violent and explicitly supported violence, even against white civilians. One of the informal slogans of the PAC was one settler, one bullet. The ANC was also supported by the Soviet Union, which was considered a very threatening force, and not a force that was interested in liberal democracy. And indeed not many of the countries on the African continent that had got independence were liberal democracies. So in that context, and where South Africa was only 10% of the population, as opposed to Israeli Jews were 50% so in that context, it's actually not so surprising in retrospect, that white South Africans saw the end of apartheid as something that would be extremely threatening to them. And one of the points I try to make in my book is that people who become accustomed to legal supremacy very frequently see legal equality as meaning their subjugation or death, that this is the way most white southerners saw things during slavery and segregation as well. So I think in that way, the analogy can help us perhaps see Israel-Palestine in a somewhat different context, and ask ourselves the question, why is it that white South Africans, or, for that matter, Protestants in Northern Ireland or white southerners turned out to be wrong about the impact of legal equality, that legal equality actually made their societies less violent, not more violent. And can that help us think about why the conventional discourse about Israel-Palestine, which is that without a Jewish state, that Jews there can't survive, that that might be wrong as well.
Andrew: This book was written before the ceasefire which happened a few weeks ago. So I do want to, I want to talk about if anything has changed since you wrote this book. If anything in your thinking has changed since this book. You know, what do you think about the ceasefire? What do you think Trump's role in that ceasefire was? And [does] he deserve some credit for it?
Peter: Yeah, I do think he deserves some credit. I think Trump, for his own reasons, wanted the political victory of seeing hostages being released as he became the president. I don't think Trump could care less about Palestinians, but I do think Trump has taken from America's war on terror, quote, unquote, that basically the United States should try to resist costly military conflicts. I think that did lead him to use a form to use a pressure on Netanyahu that Joe Biden did not use, and that also Netanyahu wanted to because he's ideologically more aligned with Trump, was also more inclined to want to give Trump this political win. I [think] a ceasefire is a good thing. It's good that some Israeli hostages will be coming home; I hope all of them come home. And it's good that Palestinians are getting a reprieve from this destruction of their society, and that more aid can come in. I worry that the ceasefire will not continue, because if it were to continue and become permanent, I think the Israeli government would probably fall, which Netanyahu doesn't want. And also because, manifestly, Israel's goals have not been attained. The goal was to destroy Hamas. Israel has not destroyed Hamas. And so if Israel maintains that goal, it has to fight, I think, continually fighting Gaza essentially indefinitely. Because I don't think it will actually ever destroy Hamas because even though it will kill Hamas fighters, its destruction of Gaza will create new fighters. And even though it destroys Hamas weaponry, Hamas will manage to find new weaponry. Indeed, we now see reports that some of the weapons that Hamas leader people are using are actually the Israeli weapons that Israel has dropped that they are now repurposing, which is an old story. This is what the Viet Cong did when the United States was fighting in Vietnam, and it's what the Taliban did in Afghanistan. So my fear is that although there will be a release of some hostages, that this deal won't progress past the first six week phase, and basically, then Israel will be continuing its war in Gaza, really, for years and years to come. And it's war in the West Bank, as we now just see, Israel has launched a major offensive there too.
Andrew: What should they do? You think? In an ideal world, what is the ideal path forward tomorrow, if you were in if you were in charge?
Peter: To me, it starts with recognizing that the Palestinians are not fundamentally a military problem. Hamas’ ideology I find really, really noxious. I oppose Islamism as I oppose any ideology which elevates one religious group over another, and Hamas has committed terrible atrocities, not just on October 7, but before that. But it's important to remember that Palestinians have been fighting against Israel and leading against Zionism since long before Hamas was created in 1987. Indeed, one of the reasons the Israeli government was fairly sympathetic to Hamas in its early years, was because they saw it as less threatening than the PLO and the PFLP and Palestinian nationalists and leftist organizations which had been using violent armed attacks against Israel going back decades, including very spectacular ones in the 1970s like the attack on the Munich Olympics airline hijacking. So the point is that Palestinian armed resistance, including against civilians, which is wrong, is not a product of Hamas. It existed long before Hamas, and it will continue after Hamas, and that's because people who are denied basic freedom will resist. It seems to me, the Israeli response needs to recognize that in any context in which people are being oppressed and people are having huge amounts of violence inflicted upon them, they're going to resist. So what matters is how you respond to that resistance. The critical thing is to actually support people who resist their oppression in an ethical way, in a way that conforms to international law, in a way that doesn't take civilian life. But if you do the reverse which Israel and the US have done, if you systematically shut down nonviolent, ethical efforts at resistance, you're actually going to make it more likely that people resist in ways that take civilian life. I have friends who are from Gaza, and they literally recount conversations with people in Hamas who say to them, your efforts have failed, where did your efforts to go to the UN or the International Criminal Court or boycotts [go?] These non violent marches like the one they had, the Great March of Return in 2018 they said, you've basically failed in these efforts. So why not give our effort a try? Even the Palestinian Authority's efforts at collaboration, working with Israel to stop armed resistance, has failed in terms of bringing Palestinians closer to a state. So to me, it starts with recognizing that Israel's problem is a political problem, not a military one, and that since Palestinian and Jewish safety are intertwined, it's only when you move towards Palestinian safety, which requires Palestinian freedom, that you are actually enduring, creating meaningful, enduring safety for Israeli Jews.
Andrew: For these next couple questions: I told some friends who were to the right of me that I was interviewing you and asked if they had any questions. And so basically their question is, why are people like you not outraged at Hamas? Why aren't you pressuring Hamas to not oppress its own people? Shouldn't international efforts focus on Hamas as well?
Peter: Well, the first thing is that our taxpayer dollars are not funding Hamas. The US does not give weapons to Hamas, right? And so it seems to me, under any moral system, you have a greater obligation for the harms that you are committing or contributing to right, as opposed to ones that may be terrible, but that you're not contributing. And so the American weapons that are being used are being used by Israel to kill Palestinians, not by Hamas to kill Israelis or indeed, Palestinians. So that’s the first point I would make. Indeed, the US classifies Hamas and treats Hamas as a terrorist organization. The second thing I would say is that Hamas is [indeed] a repressive organization. It's repressive to political dissent. It can be oppressive to women and to LGBT folks. The Palestinian Authority, by the way, is pretty oppressive as well. That oppression doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's part of this larger system of oppression. I think the best way to think about Hamas is to imagine essentially, Hamas as a kind of a prison gang that is in control within the parameters of a prison, and Israel was until October 7, essentially controlling the prison from the outside, controlling everything that came in and out. So if you want to dismantle this system, you could say double oppression, oppression of Israel, which controls Gaza from the outside and has now destroyed Gaza even internally, and Hamas, which is this kind of organization within what Human Rights Watch calls an open air prison that represses people domestically. The first thing to notice is that Israel's system of policies of blockade, since 2007 and repeated bombing have not actually done anything to dislodge Hamas? It's been about as effective as America's blockade of Cuba has been in dislodging another repressive government in leadership, which is the of the Castro communist regime. Same with Iran. What you notice is these blockades actually tend to entrench authoritarian groups in power, because for one thing Israel shut down any opportunity for people in Gaza to come in and out. They basically destroyed the private sector economy and allowed Hamas to control, to have full economic control. Same thing that's happened in Cuba, same thing that's happened in Iran. The best way to free Palestinians from both their oppression they experienced by Israel and from Hamas would be to allow Palestinians to have free election right, to be allowed Palestinians to choose their own leaders. We know that both the PA and Hamas are quite unpopular among Palestinians? But that would require Israel conceding that Palestinians have the right to choose who is going to represent them, even if they may choose political parties that Israel doesn't agree with, right? Just as Israel can choose political parties that are extremely anti Palestinian. You're accepting that Palestinians have the right to make their own political decisions. I think the best way to stop Hamas from running Gaza would be to have an agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and other political parties that you are basically going to have elections in both the West Bank and Gaza. And my suspicion, I can't prove it, but my suspicion is that if you actually allowed free elections to emerge and, and it's also important to remember that many of the most popular Palestinian political leaders are in jail, right? Marwan Barghouti, who's been in jail for 20 years, is considerably more popular than Hamas. My suspicion is, if you had a more free politics that emerged among Palestinians, what you would find is that we had a lot of political alternatives to both Fatah and Hamas emerged because they're both unpopular. And that would actually loosen the hold of both of these oppressive groups on Palestinian society.
Andrew: So another question this person had: she basically starts with the claim that the military, militant to civilian ratio in this war is low for modern urban warfare. And so I'm going to read to you what this person wrote to me. How does it add up that Israel's military offensive in Gaza constitutes a genocide, ie intent to destroy in whole or in part, when the IDF takes various steps to move the civilian population out of harm's way? For example, clearing areas of civilians before blowing up tunnels under those neighborhoods, dropping leaflets telling people to evacuate before an airstrike, etc. In fact, taking these steps before an attack results in strategic disadvantage for Israel and endangers IDF soldiers, often resulting in their deaths, escorting people out of areas of planned military action and warning before air strikes implies an intent not to destroy in part or in whole a group of people. How do you square all of this with the claim of genocide?
Peter: We don't suggest that genocide only occurs when you've killed all the people, or indeed even tried to kill all the people. So for instance, the United States applied that term to China's repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang? No one has suggested that China's tried to kill all the Uyghurs, or even has killed, or even tried to kill [them]. If you look at the US State Department, what it said about genocide in Xinjiang, a lot of it was focused on the fact that we didn't allow Uyghurs to transmit their culture to their children, that they were put in these reeducation camps where they were tortured and not allowed to practice Islam, and sometimes their children were separated from them. The Biden administration has just now also applied the term genocide to what's happening in Sudan. Again, no suggestion that all the people in Sudan, or even all the opposition forces are at risk of being killed. I think that what Israel has done, I think and is that It has destroyed the basis of life in Gaza? It has destroyed most of the hospitals, most of the schools, most of the building, most of the religious institutions, most of the agriculture? These are the things that people rely on to live. It doesn't mean that all the people die although the number of people who have died in Gaza is extraordinarily high as a percentage of the population, as a percentage of the 2 million people who live in Gaza. It's far higher than, for instance, in Iraq, in Ukraine, right, which the United States considers so outrageous that we're actually funding the Ukrainians to fight against it. So this, I think your friend, is making a series of claims about intent. I don't think those claims are actually true. I don't think there are UN or international human rights organizations that have actually verified those claims about intent. But we don't have to look at intent. We can look at a fact. If you just look at that and the percent we don't [have to]. It's true that the Gaza health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but we do have pretty good data from them which have been verified internationally by for instance, publications like The Lancet in the UK about the age and and gender of the people being killed. The Lancet study shows that about 60% of the people who've been killed in Gaza are either women, children or the elderly. And not all the adult men are Hamas fighters. In fact, probably only a minority of even the adult men are fighters. So the number of people who are being killed is considerably, probably north of 60%. It's a very clear majority of people who are being killed who are clearly non combatants. If we look at when Russia destroys a hospital in Ukraine or Saudi [Arabia] destroys one in Yemen, we don't generally take their military at face value when they say we try to get people to evacuate. We generally actually look to institutions that don't have a self interest in vindicating the state right, whether it's human rights organizations or independent journalists or the UN to make that justification. And if you look at those entities to the degree that they've been allowed to work in Gaza, which many have not right, overwhelmingly, you find that they believe that Israel has not made a significant effort to protect human, human life. In fact, the Israeli military itself, and there's been a lot of reporting now from 972+, that even compared to Israel's rules of war in previous conflicts, that Israel's standards for when it could go after targets were far, far looser. Many of the targets that were destroyed earlier in the war were called power targets in which Israel essentially bombed a huge number of targets that it didn't even claim had military significance. Office buildings, banks, apartments at least partly. That's been reported. They did this in order to try to convince the people of Gaza to rise up against Hamas. There wasn't even a claim of military targeting.
Andrew: To wrap up, what piece of advice do you have to the brown Jewish community at large?
Peter: I think Jews have always had deep disagreements, and we should have disagreements. I think the question is, what is the community trying to achieve? It seems to me that an institution like Hillel [and] other Jewish institutions at Brown, their primary obligation is to give Jewish students a chance to deepen their understanding and commitment of Judaism, which at its core, I believe, is ultimately about an encounter with Jewish texts to give students the ability to actually deepen their relationship and understanding with that. I think that anyone who's interested in that endeavor, irrespective of their views about Israel and Palestine, should be welcomed into that effort. I fear that what's happened in a lot of places, that is instead of Torah being put at the center of what, of what Jewish life is, that Israel-Palestine has become the de facto litmus test. So if you don't support a Jewish State, or you don't identify as a Zionist, then you feel you're either officially excluded, or at least you feel not really welcomed in these institutions. Which seems to me, then places a particular kind of Jewish nationalism as central to what it means to be Jewish which I don't think should be central to what Judaism is. It’s ancient. It's much longer and much older and deeper than this particular state that was created in 1948. I think that the problem is that a lot of older American Jews who have influence in these institutions want to operate Jewish institutions as if there is a pro Israel or Zionist consensus. But as I think younger Jews are more aware of in younger generations, this consensus doesn't exist anymore. It's not to say there aren't lots of passionately pro Israel young American Jews there, but there are also a significant number of passionate young American Jews who have a very, very different view. And so if you make support for Israel the litmus test of your community, you are actually kind of exiling a lot of people who have a lot to contribute and a lot also to learn, and that you should be in the business as an educational institution of facilitating that learning and facilitating that conversation, rather than shutting it down.
Andrew: Thank you so much for your time today. I'm sure the readers will very much enjoy this.