The Shame of What We’ve Done

Assessing Jews’ Responsibility for Israel’s Actions

By Abba Solomon

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 two 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 October 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.

I note that Beinart’s thoughts are resonant with what, almost 100 years ago, historian and then-Zionist Hans Kohn, wrote of 1929 anti-Jewish riots after 12 years of Zionist colonization in Palestine under British authority: “We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August. …They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt. …We have been in Palestine for 12 years [since the Balfour declaration] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people.”

Israeli retribution since October 7, 2023, on the two-million-plus population of Gaza and their means of life – homes, utilities, schools, universities, hospitals – has officially resulted in over 46,000 deaths and innumerable injuries directly from IDF attacks.

The medical journal Lancet estimates deaths as likely much higher, counting “deaths from starvation, disease or cold.”

Most of the population of Gaza was made homeless, huddled in improvised shelters, pushed by IDF warnings from one “safe zone” to another, often then bombed.

Beinart’s book is an analysis of Zionist apologetics that are necessary to both regard oneself as moral and defend what Israel has done, from the 1947-49 Nakba – terroristic expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their communities within present-day Israel – to Gaza in 2025.

He denounces dehumanizing, demonizing, Zionist lies about Palestinian resistance:

“These claims don’t withstand even modest scrutiny. They’re less arguments than talismans. They ward off dangerous emotions like grief and shame.”

Using the model of the dismantling of apartheid South Africa, he tries to envision what principles could heal Palestine:

“The details matter, but they matter less than the underlying principles. Wherever they live together, Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law. And they should work to repair the injustices of the past. The Israelis who were made refugees on October 7 should be allowed to go home. And the Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home. Historical wrongs can never be fully undone. But the more sincere the effort, the greater the reconciliation that ensues.”

This would be a radical re-conception of Jewish life in Palestine, that in abandoning the role of conquerors, Jews may live as Jewish Palestinians. He makes the point that whites relinquishing apartheid was a more peaceful process for South Africa than having it overthrown.

In the summary chapter of the book, Beinart says Israel’s conduct is from a heretical Jewish tendency to believe Jewish people are sacred, rather than people with extra obligations.

“So what if a few dreamers in Moorish Spain or the Silesian shtetl [Eastern European Jewish village] consoled themselves with the idea that deep within us lies a special spark of the divine? They didn’t have the power to do anything about it.”

This self-deification, first proposed by an Israelite named Korach, who challenged Moses’ leadership, hadn’t mattered as much until the creation of “Jewish” national power.

“All that changed with the creation of Israel. Only once Jews control a state with life-and-death power over millions of non-Jews does Korach’s claim of intrinsic Jewish sanctity become truly dangerous.”

Beinart calls for liberation for Jews from the Zionist doctrine that Jews are only victims, never victimizers:

“We can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world. …We can lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world.”

More than level of observance or denomination, the question of Zionism is going to be a fault line in Jewish fellowship, Beinart believes.

“Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it’s not clear what is left.

“But the benefit of recognizing that Jews are not fundamentally different from other people is that it allows us to learn from their experience. Jewish exceptionalism is less exceptional than we think. We are not the only people to use a story of victimhood to justify supremacy.”

Israel’s perpetual peril is the Arab population it has displaced but not exterminated. They are determined to redeem their birthright to live as freely in Palestine as Jews do.

Instead of conquest, Beinart proposes a model of restraint, cooperation, and respect – along a line of Jewish thinkers from Ahad Ha’am to Judah Magnes to Albert Einstein.

Many of the visions for Jewish settlement in Palestine were universalist and pacific.

In 1927, Zionist writer (and Chaim Weizmann protege) Maurice Samuel mused, in his book I, The Jew, that Jewish civilization “for sixty generations” demonstrated “that neither conquest or oppression was necessary to its survival. …a group can survive without mass murder.”

Whether trauma or hubris allows Zionists in Israel and elsewhere to trust that model — finding the image of God even in their “enemies” — is the question.

Abba A. Solomon is the author of “The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel” and “The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech ‘The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews.’” His website is abbasolomon.com