Agonies in Gaza, Israel, and the USofA

Jewish leaders have turned our commitment to one another into a moral sedative. ... By seeing a Jewish state as forever abused, never the abuser, 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. From Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

Peter Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. In the late '90s and early '00s, Beinart was associated with an annoying cluster of bright young intellectuals at The New Republic magazine who eagerly sought to differentiate themselves from the historical liberal traditions of their perch. Their cheerleading for America's invasion of Iraq was boundless -- until that set of fantasies collapsed amid broken American and Iraqi bodies and a broken society.

Of those folks (mostly men I think) Beinart seems the one who truly turned from ignorant, self-important cleverness toward engagement with deeper verities -- in his case through Orthodox Jewish tradition and practice. He has made himself a committed, honest observer of his world. Integrity requires of him to engage with Palestinian truths and living people as well as with his own Jewish community.

This book is his cri de coeur occasioned by the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, the subsequent Israeli war of extermination against Palestinians in Gaza (and parts of the Palestinian West Bank), and the apparent extinction of a moral compass within his own small-minded and frightened American Jewish community. He surveys the history of Israel forming itself as a Jewish state, Israeli and American attachment to a victimization mindset, the erasure of Palestinian history and lives, and the failure of all parties to see a way forward without genocide.

I am not the intended audience for this book; he's not writing to a loosely-lefty Christian American lesbian. This book speaks neither to my particular struggles nor my particular terrors. Yet I am inspired by his unstinting choice to look directly at awful realities.

Beinart's concludes:

... it’s worth remembering that the Bible considers states—which in its time meant kingdoms—very perilous things. While they may be necessary to avoid chaos, they can easily become instruments of oppression. When the Israelite elders ask the prophet Samuel for a king, God instructs him to both grant their wish and list the many cruelties a monarch will inflict. Kings are most dangerous when they view themselves ...  as inherently holy and thus infallible.

In Jewish tradition, states have no inherent value. States are not created in the image of God; human beings are. States are mere instruments. They can protect human flourishing, or they can destroy it. ... The legitimacy of a Jewish state—like the holiness of the Jewish people—is conditional on how it behaves.

... Treating a state as a god is a very frightening endeavor. It confers upon mortals a level of veneration that we do not deserve and will always abuse.

... To defend Israel, American Jews are harming our community and our country. More than half a century ago, the writer I. F. Stone noted that “Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry.” Jews whose welfare in our own countries “depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies” were championing a Jewish state “in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist.”

And now all humans between the river and the sea will be further afflicted by the antics of our own orange-faced toddler real estate mogul ... what more could go wrong?