• Abandoning the Role of Conqueror – Consortium News
    https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/03/abandoning-the-role-of-conqueror

    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.

    He writes that support for a Jewish state has become “idolatry,” permitting endless killing, torture and oppression of Palestinians:

    “There is no limit. No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite.”

    Contemporary Jewish life is filled with that idolatry, he observes. “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”

    The book attributes the horrors imposed on 2 million human beings in Gaza not only to Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but to Jews:

    “Worshipping a country that elevates Jews over Palestinians replaces Judaism’s universal God — who makes special demands on Jews but cherishes all people — with a tribal deity that considers Jewish life precious and Palestinian life cheap.”

    Beinart is not playing the peekaboo game of saying Jews are not responsible for Israel, and the other half of the time saying Israel is the Jewish State.

    He’s not saying “all Jews,” but fairly saying “representative,” “mainstream” Jewish organizations world-wide are now Zionist. Anti-Zionist organizations are dissident.

    He observes that many synagogues have an Israeli flag on the bima (platform where the Torah is read) “and a prayer for Israel in the liturgy.”

    It was predicted and warned about, as the Zionist movement grew, that the effect of creating a Jewish nation-state would be Jews being seen in the light of that state’s actions.

    The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in “diaspora” is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel’s actions, on campuses and in the streets world-wide.

    Beinart places the Hamas violence of Oct. 7, 2023, in context, as consistent with the history of suppressed peoples without peaceful means to contest their status, as is seen in slave revolts and anti-colonial guerilla wars.

    (...)