Beinart gives full expression to the fantasy that Jewish self-reform can lead to peace in the Middle East, a delusion exposed twenty years ago by Kenneth Levin in The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege (Smith & Kraus). Beinart spins the fairy tale that, had Israeli Jews and their U.S. allies not embraced the ideology of Jewish supremacism (a.k.a. “Zionism”), they could have made peace with the Palestinians, and, therefore, Hamas would have had no reason to perpetrate the October 7 massacre.
In Beinart’s telling, October 7 was a very bad thing. So too the Palestinian violence that derailed the Oslo Peace Process (largely because it helped get the “evil” Benjamin Netanyahu elected). Yet if Palestinians support Hamas, it is only because they have lost hope of achieving statehood. In making this claim, Beinart conveniently ignores that statehood had been offered to them multiple times. Apart from a fleeting nod to a 2018 study revealing that Muslims in Europe harbor contempt for Jews, he fails to confront the Islamist ideology of Muslim supremacism that drives Hamas’s hostility toward Israel.
Predictably, Beinart also downplays the global Left’s hostility toward Jews. He does acknowledge that anti-Israel thugs assaulted Jews on college campuses after October 7, but lamely suggests that Jews should take comfort in that “the vast majority of campus progressives distinguish between Jews and Israel.”
Beinart demands that Zionist students “must be willing to listen, even when it’s painful. They must distinguish between being made uncomfortable and being made unsafe.” But anyone who has covered American anti-Israel rallies knows that these events do not seek to promote peace and understanding; rather, their purpose is to intimidate and instill fear. When protesters chanted “Hey, Ho, the Zionist State Has Got to Go!” at a Boston rally this author attended, their goal was not peace and justice but the oppression of Jews.
In Beinart’s telling, Israel’s effort to defeat Hamas amounts to an act of “genocide.” He claims Jews have now become the children of Korach (Exodus 6:24)—those who have rejected the moral obligations incumbent upon the chosen people in favor of believing themselves superior to the rest of humanity. Beinart wants Jews, not Palestinians, to change; once they do utopia will emerge. He ends his book with a call to fellow Jews to liberate themselves from the ideology of “supremacy so, as partners with the Palestinians, we can help liberate the whole world.”
Victims and their families understand that October 7 was not about liberation but about Islamist supremacism. Beinart, however, does not grasp this fundamental truth.
