Why Peter Beinart Doesn’t Care About Israelis |
How our conversation revealed a progressive imperialism that puts politics above people
When Peter Beinart reached out to interview me about my new book, Being Israeli After the Destruction of Gaza, I was curious what he would ask. I wrote it, after all, to respond to what I believe is the main failure of his Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: his omission of the Israeli Jewish experience. I just couldn’t understand how one could write a book about being Jewish without taking into account the experience of Jews in the thick of it all. It felt like a moral failure that had to be corrected. Yet it wasn’t until Beinart interviewed me that I understood why he did it.
(The full interview can be viewed here; more information on my book, here.)
In a sentence, what I learned from the interview is that Beinart just doesn’t care about Israeli Jews. Whether they live or die, survive or thrive, is not really discussed in his book. Our experiences leading up to Oct 7th and those after are besides the point. They get in the way of his narrative, so must be ignored.
(He also, by the way, does not grapple with the identities and desires of non-Jews living in the Land – a group he flattens under the term ‘Palestinian’ despite their own various self-definitions which often reject being labeled as he does.)
No, Beinart does not want to complicate his narrative of the conflict because it serves him well to frame it as a Manichean battle........