The shame of what we’ve done

 

Assessing Jews’ responsibility for Israel’s actions

The dominant self-conception of the Jewish story is innocence, repeated persecutions, and then redemption by creation of the Jewish nationalist State of Israel.

This narrative is critically examined in Peter Beinart’s new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.

Beinart’s book says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel’s agency in creating the resistance it faces: “We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims.”

Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, is now an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, and a New York Times contributor.

He has been in a 20-year progression of seeing, more and more sharply, the “Jewish and democratic” state of Israel as anti-democratic and incompatible with Jewish tradition.  (more...)

The shame of what we’ve done

Another video about my new book: How we distort Jewish tradition to justify Israel’s oppression of Palestinians pic.twitter.com/iej7AGCP7K

— Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) January 26, 2025