Peter Beinart > Quotes

“We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense. It exempts Jews from external judgment. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“Fears don't exist in isolation. They tend to rise and fall depending on what people think they can do about them.”
― Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris

“From the destruction of the Second Temple to the expulsion from Spain to the Holocaust, Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we endured. We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world. Its central element should be this: We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“It began at those very Shabbat meals in Cape Town, when I began considering the other people who were present. They hovered around the periphery, in the kitchen or the garden, doing the menial work. They were legally subordinate, which, I was told, was necessary. Because they would kill us if they could. Somewhere, their Black terror army was plotting to do just that. As I reached adulthood, that story collapsed. Apartheid ended. The army that had frightened so many whites disbanded once Black South Africans could express themselves with a ballot rather than a gun. Profound inequities remained; the country did not live happily ever after. Still, the story I heard constantly in my youth—that safety required supremacy—largely disappeared. It’s now an embarrassment. Barely anyone tells that story about South Africa anymore.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“We demand that Palestinians produce Gandhis, and when they do, American Jewish organizations work to criminalize their boycotts and Israeli soldiers shoot them in the knees. No matter what strategy Palestinians employ in their fight for freedom, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies work to ensure that it fails.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“People familiar with the Hebrew Bible will note a glaring omission: the book of Joshua, which explains how those Jewish rulers became rulers in the first place. According to the text, the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua Ben Nun conquered Canaan from the seven nations that lived there. The AJC’s chronology skips over that.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“The problem with Forster and Epstein’s argument was that they didn’t merely acknowledge that leftists sometimes deployed antisemitic tropes. They described the left’s anti-Zionism as antisemitic in and of itself—as if only Jew-hatred could explain why people opposed to colonialism and racism might oppose an ideology that consigned Palestinians to legal inferiority and a state that after 1967 held millions of Palestinians under military law.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“In 2022, two political scientists, Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden, published the most comprehensive study ever of the relationship between Americans’ views about politics and their views about Jews. They found that “antisemitic views are far more common on the right than on the left.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“The answer to such bigotry should be clear: Americans are not responsible for foreign governments or organizations just because they have a common ancestry. There was nothing inherent in being German American in the 1910s that made you a supporter of the kaiser’s Germany and nothing inherent in being Japanese American in the 1940s that made you a supporter of imperial Japan. Similarly, there is nothing inherent in being Chinese American today that makes you favor the People’s Republic of China or in being Palestinian American that makes you approve of Hamas. Supporting foreign governments or organizations is a political choice, not an intrinsic expression of one’s ethnic or religious identity.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“When a Jewish state denies most of its Palestinian residents citizenship and denies all of them legal equality, it is not merely offering Jews the right to determine their own lives. It is offering them dominance over another people. And under international law, there is a word for legal dominance based on ethnicity, religion, or race—a word that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even Israel’s own leading human rights group, B’Tselem, say applies to Israel. It is not “self-determination.” It is “apartheid.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“The insistence that Israel must destroy Hamas, even as it becomes ever more obvious that it can’t, is ultimately just another way of not facing the human consequences of this war. It’s another way of not seeing what is being done in our name. It’s not all that different from the claim that the Gaza Health Ministry invents Palestinian deaths or that Hamas bears the blame for those deaths because it uses Palestinians as shields, or that what Israel is doing in Gaza is no different from what the Allies did in World War II.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world. Its central element should be this: We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense. It exempts Jews from external judgment. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“Jabotinsky and Dayan wanted to crush Palestinian resistance. Kohn turned against a Jewish state. Leibowitz urged Israel to return the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But none saw Palestinians as Nazis, pogromists, or Amalek. They understood that violent dispossession and violent resistance are intertwined.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“Only by erasing the names and experiences of ordinary Palestinians can they be made authors of their own expulsion. We evade the harsh realities of 1948 just as we evade the end of the book of Esther. In this way, Israel’s creation is made to fit the script.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“As Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, has warned, “If we continue to dish out humiliation and despair, the popularity of Hamas will grow. And if we manage to push Hamas from power, we’ll get al-Qaeda. And after al-Qaeda, ISIS, and after ISIS, God only knows.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“Early Zionists embraced the tale of Joshua’s conquest because they lived in an age of colonization when indigeneity wasn’t a trump card. If you wanted the land, and believed you hailed from a more advanced civilization and could thus cultivate it better than the natives, that was justification enough.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams. It’s about the story that enables our leaders, our families, and our friends to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip—the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name—and shrug, if not applaud. It’s about the story that convinces even Jews who are genuinely pained by Gaza’s agony that there is no other way to keep us safe. It’s our version of a story told in many variations by many peoples in many places who decide that protecting themselves requires subjugating others, that equality is tantamount to death.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“For more than a half-century, anti-intellectualism has had a pretty good run in presidential politics. In fact, Republicans would never have gotten where they are without it.”
― Peter Beinart

“So then why does the AJC ignore the Bible’s account of Joshua’s invasion? Because it contradicts our contemporary narrative of victimhood. The only conquests the organization acknowledges are ones that come at the Jews’ expense. “The Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel and first achieved self-determination there 3,000 years ago,” declares the AJC, without ever explaining how that “self-determination” came to be. Then “the Romans expelled the majority of Jews in 70 C.E.” For groups like the AJC, which want to prove that Zionism isn’t a colonial movement, the book of Joshua is inconvenient since, to contemporary ears, it sounds quite colonial itself.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported that “over the course of the protests, Israeli security forces killed 223 Palestinians and injured more than 8,000. The vast majority of casualties were unarmed and posed no threat to anyone.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“We’d recognize that governments—democratic, authoritarian, and everything in between—try to minimize their crimes.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“1948 report by Israel’s own intelligence service concluded that Zionist attacks accounted for roughly 70 percent of the Palestinian departures, while orders from Arab forces accounted for roughly 5 percent. Despite this, Jewish communal officials still often insist that Arabs, not Zionists, forced the Palestinians out. Nor do they grapple with one last, uncomfortable fact: Even if Palestinians did leave because Arab armies attacked, or because Arab governments urged them to, Israel still didn’t let them return.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“As I reached adulthood, that story collapsed. Apartheid ended. The army that had frightened so many whites disbanded once Black South Africans could express themselves with a ballot rather than a gun. Profound inequities remained; the country did not live happily ever after. Still, the story I heard constantly in my youth—that safety required supremacy—largely disappeared. It’s now an embarrassment. Barely anyone tells that story about South Africa anymore. Yet every day, Jews tell it about Israel. I hear it from people I know, respect, even love.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“A better analogy would be America’s response to attacks from Indian reservations in the nineteenth century. In Gaza, Israel isn’t fighting citizens of another country. It’s fighting people who hold no citizenship because Israel forced them from their land and now confines them in a coastal ghetto. It’s hard to find contemporary analogies for that kind of war because it’s a throwback to the colonial age.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“This selective vision pervades contemporary Jewish life. Consider the way establishment Jewish groups invoke the Bible to validate the Jewish people’s relationship to the land of Israel. In February 2024, the American Jewish Committee set out to rebut the claim that Israel is a settler-colonial state. To prove the Jewish connection to the land, it cites the book of Genesis, in which—as the AJC describes it—“God promises the land of Israel to Abraham, the first Jew.” It then moves to the book of Exodus, in which “Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery and oppression in Egypt with a promise to take them back to the land of Israel, the land of their forefathers.” Then it jumps ahead to the “books of Judges and Kings,” which “relate the stories of Jewish rulers over the land of Israel.” People familiar with the Hebrew Bible will note a glaring omission: the book of Joshua, which explains how those Jewish rulers became rulers in the first place. According to the text, the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua Ben Nun conquered Canaan from the seven nations that lived there. The AJC’s chronology skips over that.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“The greatness of this people was once that it believed in God,” she wrote in 1963. “And now this people believes only in itself?”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“Like U.S. leaders in Vietnam, who endlessly cited body counts of dead Vietcong to show they were winning the war, Netanyahu can boast about how many Hamas brigades Israel has eliminated and how many Hamas rockets it has blown up. But Hamas will recruit more fighters and build more rockets. Just look at the record.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“It’s our version of a story told in many variations by many peoples in many places who decide that protecting themselves requires subjugating others, that equality is tantamount to death.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“1948 report by Israel’s own intelligence service concluded that Zionist attacks accounted for roughly 70 percent of the Palestinian departures, while orders from Arab forces accounted for roughly 5 percent.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“It's easy to see why conservatives would be salivating at the thought of a Hillary primary challenge. Presidents who face serious primary challenges—Ford, Carter, Bush I—almost always lose. The last president who lost reelection without a serious primary challenge, by contrast, was Herbert Hoover. But in truth, the chances that Obama will face a primary challenge are vanishingly slim, and the chances that he will lose reelection only slightly higher. No wonder conservatives are fantasizing about Hillary Clinton taking down Barack Obama. If she doesn't, it's unlikely they will.”
― Peter Beinart