Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

By Peter Beinart

Knopf 2025

A book featuring the titanically overused “reckoning” in its title, particularly if that book is 100 pages long, can be legitimately suspected of being lazy palavering, which would be not only unfortunate but almost blasphemous when the subject is Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza and the West Bank. So Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, a slim little thing from City University of New York journalism professor Peter Beinart, might cause a crease of worry even before its first page is turned.

After all, what can the book’s very title actually mean? Half the world’s Jews don’t live in Israel, and of the ones who do, presumably very few are in decision-making roles within the Netanyahu government that’s doing the bombing and killing. Being a Jew after the destruction of Gaza will entail all the same things that being a Jew entailed before it. Surely what Beinart is asking here is: how should a Jew feel about the bombing and killing?

But although polling on such a question is inevitably hazy, it’s fairly clear that most of the world’s Jews disapprove of the staggering bloodshed the Netanyahu government has unleashed in the last 15 months, as indeed most of the world’s other humans do. At least 50,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since October 7; well over 12,000 of those casualties have been under the age of 18; in a damnation of the Netanyahu government for the rest of time, thousands have been infants. These are figures from some kind of blood-soaked alternate dimension; no terrorist attack, no hostage rescue could conceivably even begin to justify them. Literally the only people who disagree with this are themselves monsters.

Given such givens, Beinart’s book would have to be extraordinary simply in order not to disappoint, and it’s not extraordinary. Beinart views himself as part of the old familiar metaphor of the world’s Jews as a family, but he insists that family has been corrupted. “Jewish leaders have turned our commitment to one another into a moral sedative,” he writes. “They have traded on our solidarity to justify starvation and slaughter. They have told us that the way to show we care about Israelis taken hostage by Hamas is to support a war that kills and starves those very hostages, and that the way to honor the memory of the Israelis Hamas murdered is to support a war that will create tens of thousands more scarred, desperate young Palestinians eager to avenge their loved ones by taking Israeli lives.”

Even readers appreciating such bolt-clear prose (Beinart is a very forceful writer) will wonder what the point of it is. The Netanyahu government has cynically made these kinds of claims, yes, but most people have not believed them, even then the lies were fresh. So why bang away like this, on hollow posturing that’s always been manipulative deceit? Is motive likewise a benign kind of deceit, designed to backhand-underscore that idea of the worldwide Jewish family? How much of any of this is supposed to be a genuine reflection of either what Beinart thinks or what anybody else thinks?

“From Putin to Modi to Xi to Trump, thugs dominate the globe, inciting tribal violence while they steal their nations blind,” he writes. “In its unchecked cruelty and unbearable pain, the destruction of Gaza is a symbol of our age.” Jews are not “history’s permanent virtuous victims,” he writes. “We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it.”

Is anyone doubting any of this? None of it stalls to the point of banality, but this is about as far from being a “reckoning” as a grade school dodge-ball match. In fact, for most of its bantam length, the book is the very last thing any book about Gaza should be: easy. Given Beinart’s obvious erudition and eloquence, the temptation here is to avoid blaming the book by instead blaming the subject. Considering the fact that thousands of bodies are still buried in the rubble of Gaza, maybe it’s too soon for any kind of reckoning.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News