Why Peter Beinart Doesn’t Care About Israelis 

How our conversation revealed a progressive imperialism that puts politics above people

When Peter Beinart reached out to interview me about my new book, Being Israeli After the Destruction of Gaza, I was curious what he would ask. I wrote it, after all, to respond to what I believe is the main failure of his Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: his omission of the Israeli Jewish experience. I just couldn’t understand how one could write a book about being Jewish without taking into account the experience of Jews in the thick of it all. It felt like a moral failure that had to be corrected. Yet it wasn’t until Beinart interviewed me that I understood why he did it.

(The full interview can be viewed here; more information on my book, here.)

In a sentence, what I learned from the interview is that Beinart just doesn’t care about Israeli Jews. Whether they live or die, survive or thrive, is not really discussed in his book. Our experiences leading up to Oct 7th and those after are besides the point. They get in the way of his narrative, so must be ignored.

(He also, by the way, does not grapple with the identities and desires of non-Jews living in the Land – a group he flattens under the term ‘Palestinian’ despite their own various self-definitions which often reject being labeled as he does.)

No, Beinart does not want to complicate his narrative of the conflict because it serves him well to frame it as a Manichean battle between good and evil. Black and white chess pieces on a board. Doing so makes it easier for him, I can only assume,  to confirm his place on the side of the ‘good’ and thereby maintain the grace of his American progressive peers.

I understood this because Beinart did not ask me one question about the Israeli experience that my book is devoted to. No question about the individuals whose stories make up the eleven chapters exploring the liberal, democratic Jewish experience in Israel. No moment of pause or reflection on how Meredith Mishkin-Rothbart returned to co-running her peace building organization weeks after the brutal invasion of October 7th, despite thinking she could no longer be a peace maker. No discussion of the complexity of Israeli identity as touchingly defined by Yau Levy. No desire to understand how Aliza Inbal’s belief in a Canadian bi-national future for Israel can be squared with her Zionism. No inquiry into how Bernard Avishai envisions the Hebrew Republic’s future, nor David Green’s understanding of how the current government capitalizes on victimhood to justify violence, nor questions about Noa Keinan’s belief in grassroots activism as the only thing we can do to break the alienation of the current moment.

To Beinart, Israelis don’t matter. Their beings are not of concern, their reckonings are rejected, their politics and perceptions are ignored in favor of Beinart’s analysis from his perch on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

This incredible omission taught me two things: first, that Beinart does not believe in liberal democracy. Because a belief in liberal democracy – the belief that all human beings are created equal and therefore should have a voice in their political reality – would require him to engage with the very people who would need to agree to the political reality he would like created in the region. While he presents that all he wants is the creation of a non-Jewish “state of all its citizens” – one he assures us will treat each person equally before the law – he does not grapple with what those citizens actually want. As if such a state would last without the constant agreement of its citizens and avoid civil war if they opposed such an imposition. As if those same citizens do not already have desires of their own, political allegiances they’re ready to fight and kill and die to maintain.

Were he to believe in the egalitarian state he advocates for in place of the State of Israel, he would need to contend with the fact that the Jewish desire for self-determination is based on thousands of years of living as second-class citizens in all the countries of their dispersal. Jewish citizens – especially the more than majority whose roots are in Muslim lands – will fight to ensure that dhimmitude does not happen again. This is relevant because of the counter-desire of the Islamists leading the Palestinian movement who are motivated by more than a thousand years of Arab imperialism to impose their will on the residents of the Land. And all that is without bringing up Christian interests in the Holy Land, which few seem to remember when they hear ‘anti-War’ messages from the Pope.

Therein is the contradiction in Beinart’s advocacy: he claims to want to create a liberal democracy in the region while disregarding the fundamental actors that make liberal democracy possible: the people. Beinart is itching to take up the role of the benevolent dictator, willing to impose his views on people an ocean away, because he believes the world will be better for it. He may call himself a progressive, but we have an older word for that urge: imperialism.

It saddens me to learn this about Beinart, but I still have hope for the 14% of American Jews between 18-34 who now declare themselves anti-Zionists. I hope their democratic values will keep them from concluding, as Beinart does, that America should impose its political vision on Israel’s citizens. I hope their liberalism will bring them to engage with the Israelis who will determine the future of Israel, either by voting to make it so, or by reacting to imperialist pressure. And I hope they avoid Beinart’s moral failure and come to recognize that the experience of being Israeli after the destruction of Gaza is far more complex, challenging, and full of hope. Which is why I wrote my book, and why I hope Beinart’s readers will find the time to read it.