“A Collapse of Moral Distinctions”

Feb. 2025. For Judisk Krönika. Swedish original and English translation by Sarah Clyne Sunberg

Why are so many Jews unable to see Israel’s actions against Palestinians as oppression, even as they oppose oppression elsewhere? Where is the line? These are questions that Peter Beinart grapples with in his latest book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. A book he says he wrote, “out of love and solidarity with our people.”

Beinart has long worried about the consequences of this uncritical stance to Israeli policy. But, he says, “I could never have imagined that the destruction of the entirety of the Gaza Strip and the call for mass ethnic cleansing would be acceptable in large mainstream American Jewish organizations.”

It is the day after the press conference at which Donald Trump, president of the United States and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister participated, and Trump suggested expelling all residents of Gaza and building a beach hotel where their homes once stood.

In his book Beinart writes that Jewish liberation hinges on Palestinian liberation. That Israelis and Jews around the world need to free themselves from equating abuse of power with Jewish security in the name of the law. 

“This is partially about a moral liberation. Liberation from dehumanization of others and liberation from living in racist fear. But it is also about achieving real physical security for the Jewish population of Israel.” 

Such security can only be achieved by guaranteeing the equal rights of the Palestinian population, Beinart says. He illustrates this by pointing out that Jewish Israelis are afraid of Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank, but not of those who are Israeli citizens and live within the nation’s borders.

“There’s this linguistic fiction we have created by calling them Arab Israelis. They’re just the Palestinians whose families managed not to get expelled in 1948. The point is that Israeli Jews are not terrified when they go on the operating table and are treated by Palestinian doctors and nurses, as they often are.”

According to Beinart, one of the reasons for this is that 1948-Palestinians have a stake in Israeli society and a chance at a decent life – both factors that reduces the tendency toward violence according to political science literature. When the state excludes millions of people and subjects them to brutal oppression this creates a violent environment that is dangerous to both Israelis and Palestinians. 

Beinart describes October 7, 2023 as “maybe the worst day of my life.” He forced himself to participate in Simchat Torah celebrations even as he understood that something terrible had happened, not knowing exactly what, since he, as an observant Jew, had turned his phone off for the holiday. 

Still, he cautions against letting knee-jerk historical analogies cloud our vision and keep us from recognizing the ways in which Palestinian violence against Israelis is unlike the Holocaust or Russian pogroms.

“The really horrifying violence that Israelis were subject to on October 7 becomes incomprehensible unless you place it in its context.”

By which he means a context other than what he describes as a constant retelling of Megillat Esther, a narrative in which Jews are perpetual righteous victims and the antagonist an incarnation of Amalek, rising up in each generation to destroy the Jewish people. 

In his book Beinart writes that he experienced a sort of collapse of moral distinctions after October 7: “The voices that opposed Israel’s actions and spoke of Hamas’ attacks as resistance at times made it seem that there was no moral distinction, between boycotting a product, initiating a protest against Israeli policy, shooting a soldier and killing a child.”

As if, he writes, Hamas was not “a corrupt and despotic organization with a long history of brutality against both Israelis and Palestinians, and had not just murdered and tortured more than a thousand souls.”

He maintains that there was a similar collapse in the Israeli discourse, where Netanyahu speaks of the attack against the kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope as Auschwitz and Hamas is likened to Amalek.

Zionism rests on the idea that the creation of a Jewish nationstate would guarantee that Jews would never again be defenseless victims. Beinart says that Israel still tends to assume the position of victim. The state justifies its actions against Palestinians by saying that anyone who is against Israel is an antisemite and that Israelis are thus always victims, in the same way that Jews, historically, have been victims of antisemitism. 

“In fact, what you have in Israel is the reality of power, joined with a discourse of victimhood, to absolving us from the moral responsibility of power,” Beinart says. 

So what Israeli response would Beinart have wanted after October 7, 2023? 

In December that year he wrote in the New York Times that Israel, “should pursue the people who masterminded the Oct. 7 slaughter to the ends of the earth and the end of their days. But it should halt its invasion of Gaza and negotiate a long-term cease-fire that leads to freedom for all the remaining Israeli hostages.”

When asked how he went from a more uncritical and unconditionally supportive view of Israeli policy, to his current stance he says:

“It was a long process. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s and met Palestinians during a trip to the West Bank that I began to seriously ask myself what the Israeli state and its ideology meant for the Palestinian population.”

He writes that he was struck by how multidimensional the Palestinians he met were. It was then that he realized the degree to which he had previously regarded them as less than fully complex humans. 

“As I began to start to see things through Palestinian eyes I began to realize that there were some really difficult moral questions, that I as someone who claims to believe in the principle of equality under the law would have to grapple with.”

Beinart points out that contemporary liberal American Jewish institutions tend to exhibit far more tolerance for a range of religious stances, than stances on Israel.

“As a Jew you can go to any Hillel and say that you don’t believe in God and still be received with open arms. But saying that you are not a zionist is unacceptable.”

Beinart likens the unconditional support for the state of Israel that has come to be central to mainstream Jewish organizations in the US to a form of idol worship – a move away from a religiously motivated morality on right and wrong which has previously been the founding principle of judaism.