An x-radiograph of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (ca. 1620s) reveals a servant of African descent restraining a dog, both painted out by the artist | Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025) is a book that will cause much outrage among some of its intended audience: fellow Jews. If there is one thing to which many Jews cleave, it is to our history of victimhood, and the purity that flows naturally from that status.
Beinart will have none of that. “Jews, too, can be Pharaoh,” he writes—and Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the overwhelming support it has received from many Jews for even its worst crimes are signs of the moral collapse.
Beinart, a practicing Orthodox Jew, is well-positioned to write this book. Originally an outspoken Zionist and supporter of Israel, he has become opposed to any idea of a Jewish state that entails oppressing another people. (He has not, however, abandoned his Jewish faith, which permeates this slim volume.)
In his new book, whose chapters range across and refute the arguments of those who support Israel’s actions since October 7, Beinart points out the disingenuous ways in which many Jewish holidays are currently celebrated. For example, in many contemporary retellings, the Purim story, in which the Jews are saved from mass slaughter in Persia thanks to Queen Esther, omits the subsequent slaughter of 75,000 Persians by the newly saved Jews. Passover, with its tale of the Jewish flight from slavery is often observed in progressive ceremonies that ignore the fact that the Bible makes it clear that the ancient Israelites were slave owners too.
The carefully constructed myth of modern Jews as the eternal “virtuous victim,” in Beinart’s words, is at the heart of this point of view criticized in this volume: the sacralization of Israel and the acceptance of the unacceptable when committed by the Jewish state.
Beinart, unlike some left-wing anti-Zionists, felt horror at the murders committed by Hamas in its terrorist massacre of October 7, 2023. “In those early days,” he writes, “I scoured antiwar essays and speeches for expressions of outrage at the murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians. Often, they weren’t there.” But he also feels horror at Israel’s disproportionate and even more murderous response—and also at the failure of some Western leaders and Jews to condemn Israel for its war crimes. “We are forever Esther and our detractors are forever Haman,” he dryly observes, “even when a nuclear-armed Jewish state subjugates millions of Palestinians who lack citizenship in the country they’ve inhabited for their entire lives.”
October 7 gave rise to comparisons to the Holocaust and pogroms of the past. But Beinart rejects the analogy, since the European victims of antisemitic pogroms “were members of a vulnerable minority living in countries that had long restricted their rights … In Israel, by contrast, Jews enjoy legal supremacy, and it is Palestinians who lack basic freedoms.”
Perhaps the most alarming expression of this belief was the national reaction to student protests against the war in Gaza last spring. I share Beinart’s view that the Palestinians are not contemporary avatars of an eternal Jew hatred; They are legitimate rebels against colonial oppression. Were the students in many ways ignorant and engaging in performative revolutionism, culturally appropriating a suffering people’s struggle to embellish their radical street cred? Absolutely. Was there antisemitism in these demonstrations? In some cases, absolutely. The Columbia student who said he wanted to “murder Zionists” was using barely coded language. But a threat? A Columbia student who graduated from Boston Latin bloviating on social media? There is something deeply pathetic in American Jews on and off college campuses quaking in fear at the acts of what Beinart calls “nineteen year old anthropology majors.”
Israel these days is “righteous by definition,” as Beinart sarcastically writes. And when Benjamin Netanyahu “proudly declares that a Jewish state cannot be judged by any external standard, he is making that state—and the Jewish people for whom it speaks—an object of worship.” Jews risk becoming idolaters of our own image.
At one point, Beinart appositely refers to the thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin once called “the conscience of Israel.” Leibowitz warned that “in our times of worldwide decolonization, a colonial regime necessarily gives birth to terrorism.” As Beinart sums up his position: “Being chosen by God did not make Jews better than anyone else. It meant they had a special set of obligations … not a special set of virtues.”
Beinart’s hope is that a voice steeped in Jewish thought and values that calls on Jews to see their Pharaonic qualities will have an impact. After millennia of oppression, it’s entirely possible that the taste for power, for the ability to strike out at those weaker than us, for refusing to admit to a fall from moral grace has too thoroughly infected our sense of identity for us to recover from it any time soon.
For Peter Beinart, Israel’s destruction of Gaza represents a violation of Jewish values. But the destruction of Gaza is far more than that; it is a violation of the laws of humanity that govern us all. I am grateful that Beinart has articulated some of my own views on the ongoing tragedy in Israel. But a thousand Kol Nidrei prayers on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, asking forgiveness for our sins, will not absolve us of the crimes we have allowed to be carried out in our name.
