Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (New York: Knopf, 2025):
A Meditation by Peter Eisenstadt
Jews celebrate the holiday of Purim with merrymaking, cosplaying and grogger rattling. But at the end of the Book of Esther we read: “And the Jews struck down their enemies with a blow of the sword, and with killing and destruction, they did to their enemies as they willed,” 75,000 enemies in all. This is, Peter Beinart tells us at the beginning of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza a gruesome coda to a happy, boozy holiday, but it is typical of what he calls the “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” theme of many Jewish holidays, in which the celebration of Jewish survival has the subtext of revenge against Jewish enemies, the bloody death of Haman’s minions, the Haggadah’s calling on God to “pour out thy wrath…let your blazing anger overtake them, pursue them in your fury and destroy them,” or Hanukkah’s army of Maccabees striking down the Jewish traitors.
For most of Jewish history, Beinart notes, revenge fantasies were relatively harmless; Jews might dream of oppressing their oppressors, of living out a counter-factual history, but were not in a position to do anything about it. No doubt the reason Israeli and Jewish audiences so liked Quentin Tarrantino’s film Inglorious Basterds (2009), was because its ending was gloriously unhistorical, a WWII film in which Jews murdered Hitler and Goebbels and lots of other top Nazis and their families, somehow giving the Holocaust a somewhat happier ending. George Orwell in the spring of 1945 wrote “properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act that you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless. As soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.”
I don’t think that is correct. Revenge fantasies have never been confined to the powerless. And the revenge fantasies of the powerful are often directed against supposed enemies who are weak and, all too frequently, posed no threat at all, be it Hitler against Jews, Stalin against kulaks, Mao against capitalist roaders, or the current head of the regime in power in the United States, who daily pours out his wrath against an ever-expanding list of enemies that he tries to destroy. If anything Orwell needs to be reversed. The revenge fantasies of the powerless, as they experience them, only highlight and dramatize their impotence, but give no lasting relief. The powerful, on the other hand, can see and sense how their talk and actions creates terror among their victims, and the perpetrators get to enjoy the perverse pleasures of sadism. But for powerful and powerless alike, intense hatred and revenge fantasies are a drug, giving the hater an intense high, making them feel intensely alive. But like all drugs, the high doesn’t last long, and addiction to revenge reduces one’s emotional capacity to mush and one’s soul to ash.
The existence of Israel has created a new set of revenge fantasies for both those in power and those without it. Revenge fantasies are backgrounded in the early history of Zionism but come to the fore after the rise of Nazism, and there were some, like Abba Kovner, a Vilna ghetto partisan leader and later a prominent Mapamnik, who entertained murky plans of murdering millions of Germans by poisoning German water systems. But far more common among Holocaust survivors in the new Israel was transferring their revenge fantasies to Arabs and Palestinians, as the latest in the long list of Jewish persecutors and haters. And the Nakba has likewise fueled Palestinian revenge fantasies, acted out by a changing set of perpetrators, from the fedayeen through the Second Intifada to Hamas. And this brings us October 7th and the Gaza War, which for all the very real bloodshed and devastation on both sides is also a psychodrama of sorts, where both peoples, as never before, have acted out their revenge fantasies on the largest possible stage. Beinart writes well of the vertigo that so many of us felt after October 7th, first the horror of the pitiless Hamas attacks followed by the pitiless Israeli revenge. As he writes, “by seeing a Jewish state as forever abused, never abusing, we deny its capacity for evil. Before October 7, I thought I understood the dangers of this way of thinking. Turns out I had no idea.”
Some military response to the attacks of October 7th was appropriate. But Beinart is appropriately skeptical of the “work” that the phrase “Israel has the right to defend itself” does. “Defense” in this context is a weaselly word, a euphemism. In 1947, the United States, embarking on its mission of global hegemony, changed the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense, waging defensive wars in Korea, Vietnam and many other places. I would argue that what Israel has, what any sovereign nation has, is the right to wage a just war, with an emphasis on the just part, a war with rules and limits, to the extent that is possible.
And though self-defense sounds less aggressive than making war, it really isn’t since it implies that you either have already been or are about to be attacked, that your life is threatened, and therefore, in the struggle for survival, for existence against an enemy that would destroy you, all in permitted. In other words, a “right to defend oneself” is often taken as the right to exact revenge on your enemies, and revenge easily spirals out of all proportion. It has been all too easy for Netanyahu and the plug-uglies in his coalition to make this war into one more episode in the eternal war against the Jews, with interchangeable perpetrators, from Amalek to Haman to Hitler to Yayha Sinwar, placing antisemitism somehow outside of history, outside of Jewish history, as if it doesn’t matter what Jews actually do, because Jews are, by definition, innocent, perhaps sinned against, but never sinning. And a key to understanding the wars of October 7th is that they did not begin on October 7th. By some accounts, the current war in Gaza is the 15th armed conflict Israel has waged in Gaza since 1948.
This September will mark the 20th anniversary of the Gaza “disengagement,” and the beginning of the partial, and then nearly total blockade of Gaza. This was one of the strangest blockades in history, a blockade intended not to topple but to strengthen the regime being blockaded. The main reason Israel allowed Hamas to rule in Gaza was precisely because Hamas was committed to armed struggle against it, and as long as Hamas controlled Gaza, the Palestinian Authority didn’t and couldn’t, so Israel could plausibly claim that there was no one to negotiate with. But engendering hatred against yourself as a means of trying to enhance your own security is a perverse and risky strategy, and it’s not surprising that it required the “little” Gaza wars of 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and 2021, with a combined death toll of about 4000 Gazans and 100 Israelis to maintain control. And I think that almost everyone expected, Netanyahu perhaps excepted, that some day that Israel’s jerry-rigged “virtual occupation” of Gaza would all come tumbling down. But not like this. No, never like this.
Let us be frank. The Israeli war against Gaza is a still-unfolding atrocity, conducted with a near depraved indifference to Palestinian deaths or mutilation, a war in which journalists and aid workers have been targeted and killed, a war in which almost all of Gaza has been displaced, with many living in hovels or tents, a war in which Israel’s refusal to allow the entrance of food, medicine, and other essentials are employed as a weapon of control and war. It has been a war against the civilian population of Gaza, loosely disguised as a war against Hamas. You can call it genocide—I would—or not, but however you taxonomize it, it has been a stomach-turning atrocity. And if it a genocide of a very different kind and on a vaster smaller scale than the Holocaust. As anyone making this claim needs to acknowledge, this is in no way an exculpation for Israeli actions.
There have been protests, but within Israel the protesters were far outnumbered by those who wanted the war to continue, and internationally the protests have amounted to little more than bleats against the war machine. This is in large part because of the support from the Biden administration, sometimes with a few reservations that counted for very little. Despite a brief truce, Israel has been egged on by his successor with an unholy glee, whose only complaint about the Israeli war machine is that it has been insufficiently ruthless, and who has called for mass expulsions from Gaza and, incoherently, for some sort of American control.
How did this become possible? The obvious answer is the occupation, which over its almost six decades has progressively deadened Israelis’ moral sensibilities and those of much of the Jewish people as a whole. It has inured too many Israelis to treating the inequality between Jews and Palestinians, between Israeli citizens and non-citizens under Israel’s sovereign control, as something normal, unavoidable, and necessary. But it has been a slippery slope to this slough of despond, from which there is apparently no exit.
All I can say is that the two days I spent in Hebron in 2016 chilled me to the bone like no other experience in my life; seeing a street divider that ordered Jews to one side and Palestinians to the other, and when I also witnessed the IDF tear gassing grade schoolers on their way to school. Is it surprising that we have gone from Hebron in 2016 to Gaza in 2025? Not really, perhaps, but nothing in this moral slide has been inevitable.
Let me suggest that the most useful way to think about the Gaza War is as the latest and most brutal phase of a Jewish-Palestinian civil war that dates back to at least 1936, when the first Palestinian revolt began. And if this civil war has made both sides hate each other with the sort of murderous and vengeful intensity that civil wars typically engenders, it has also made the two peoples, though neither would have wanted this to happen, to be conjoined, like inseparable twins, with a link that cannot be sundered without damaging both peoples. As for the two peoples, including Jews in the diaspora, not only are they fated to be entwined forever; they must learn how to live together as full and real equals. Beinart suggests that it is imperative for all Jews to become a little bit Palestinian, to talk to Palestinians and read Palestinian authors, and to do so with an open mind, without subverting dialogue through our old warmed-over rebuttals.
The current phase of this civil war, driven by both the atrocities of Hamas and the atrocities of the Israeli response, has been an attempt to deny and forestall the reality of Jewish and Palestinian linkedness. Beinart quotes Heschel: “To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race [or Beinart adds, tribal supremacy of any kind] is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity.” Amen.
I don’t see any realistic political solution that might permanently alleviate the suffering in Gaza. I hope I am wrong, and that the situation changes very soon. But even if there is no political way forward, there is a moral way for us to travel. And this begins by starting to come to terms with Gaza. Should, Beinart asks, should Jews feel guilty? Guilt is a crippling emotion, often destroying our capacity for clear thinking, and is usually quite unproductive Perhaps part of the traditional wisdom of the Jewish people is that a little guilt can be useful as a lubricant, if mixed with other emotions, such as a sense of responsibility, what Beinart calls a reckoning, and some humility. Add some legitimate anger at evil brutalities like Hamas, both for what they did to us and shame that they brought out the worst in us. and some hesed or lovingkindness for all, perhaps finding new meanings in Ruth’s pledge to Naomi, “your people will be my people.”
And perhaps the next time we celebrate Purim, we might also think, “we tried to destroy them, they survived; if they will have us, let’s eat together.” Not out of a new appreciation for Haman, but a newfound sense that every people has its Hamans and its Mordecais, their Pharaohs with their hardened hearts, and their Moses’s who harken to the holy, and that whether we become one or the other is never preordained, but our free choice. In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, the historian Omer Bartov has suggested that because of the Gaza War, though too late for its victims, perhaps “the sons and daughters of the next generation [of Israeli Jews] will be able to rethink their own lives and future, beyond the memory of the Holocaust; they will also have to pay for the sins of their parents.”
Moral catastrophes can perhaps be liberating in that way, but the memory of the Gaza War should not, and I am pretty sure will not, replace the memory of the Holocaust. Instead, I hope they will ponder how and why a people so steeped in the horrible lessons of the Holocaust could, just a few generations after, perpetrate the atrocities in Gaza, and how, all too easily, the victims became the victimizers, and the goal is to be neither, for all peoples. I hope they will try to hold both together as encompassing the brutal and humbling contradictions of Jewish history. And perhaps Jews, joined by the Palestinians, can rehabilitate a good sentiment that was put to a wayward purpose: “Never again, never, ever, again.”
Peter Eisenstadt is a member of the board of Partners for Progressive Israel and the author of Against the Hounds of Hell: A Biography of Howard Thurman (University of Virginia, 2021).
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