Hamas’ attack on Israel this weekend—including the indiscriminate murder of Israelis—has led to a spiraling of an already dire situation in the region. The recent declaration of war, and the subsequent military actions in Gaza, has set off a crisis in an already calamitous conflict, particularly for the 2 million Gazans—half of whom are children—who have been living in one of the mostly densely populated places on Earth. The UN already deemed this 25-mile-long area “unlivable” five years ago due to the Israeli blockade. Civilian residents are now facing a “complete siege,” per Israel’s defense minister’s order, including the cutting of electricity and a total blockade on food, water, and fuel. They’re also being bombed in nonstop airstrikes with heavy munitions following the unprecedented incursion into Israel by Hamas, which left a trail of hundreds of innocent Israelis dead, thousands injured, and at least 100 more captured. Meanwhile, rocket attacks continue to set off air raid sirens as far away as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
To help contextualize and understand what happened this weekend, and the decades before it, I reached out to Peter Beinart, a writer and editor at large of Jewish Currents, a progressive Jewish magazine. I wanted to know how Beinart was feeling as both a Jewish person and a critic of Israel’s far-right government, and what ripple effects he expects from its new war with Gaza. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: What is your assessment of the recent attacks by Hamas on Israel and its impact on the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Peter Beinart: This is one of those moments where the magnitude of what has happened is so great that it’s really difficult to think about all of the potential long-term consequences. It’s a little bit like someone asking, immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks or at the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, “What’s going to be the long-term implications?” There’s so many long-term implications. This sets off a chain reaction for so many things. It’s very difficult to predict. The most immediate effect is that it looks like there’s going to be some kind of ground invasion into Gaza. And the Israeli government will be more far more aggressive even than it has been in the past. That is the one thing we do know.
The shock of this inside Israel, and how that transforms the Israel and Palestine conflict, is, at least for me, hard to know at this point. Many of us, myself included, are just really just staggered and reeling at the images of the brutality. And it’s hard to be an objective, rational political analyst, even for someone like me, who’s very, very critical of Israel. We’re so close to the place and to the people that I myself have been in a kind of state of vertigo, especially because there were also a lot of us who were not online until Sunday night, because it was it was a Shabbat, followed by a Jewish holiday. So it made the whole thing even more surreal.
Now I feel bad for asking you these questions.
The challenge for me is that it’s difficult to find the right balance between the pain that I feel at a kind of familial level towards Israeli Jews and the human obligation to cherish the dignity of all peoples and of all human life. And of course, Palestinians, as always, will suffer far, far more than Israeli Jews because they’re by far the weaker part of this.
So, the whole world is, it seems, rallying behind Israel. Israeli flags are being projected onto national monuments across the Western world. And at the same time, the Israeli defense minister has ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, amassing troops on their border and halting the transfer of electricity, food, and water. What ripple effects do you expect that this new war will have on the region and beyond?
My basic bedrock assumption is that the fate of these two peoples are intertwined. Neither of them are going anywhere. I understand the tremendous sense of fear and rage that would make many Israelis want their government to go into Gaza. There are parallels to the way many Americans felt after Sept. 11. But those emotions did not serve America well. Israel has been blockading Gaza for many, many years now and has bombarded Gaza many, many times. If that were an effective strategy, then what happened this weekend would not have happened.
It’s not rocket science. You can kill members of Hamas and you can destroy their weapons and their munitions. But in the process of doing that, you create much more misery and hatred among people who will then grow up in the shadow of that misery and hatred and want to fight you. People are creative, and so they’ll find a way of getting more weapons.
Ultimately, Israel doesn’t have a military problem. It has a political problem. It has a human problem. And the problem is that you have these millions of people—most of them are not from Gaza. Most of them are the family of refugees that were forced out of their homes in Israel when Israel was created. And if they don’t have the ability to live a dignified, decent life, then many of them are going to try to make sure that Israeli Jews can’t live safe and dignified lives. That’s the way human beings tend to be, all over the world. And if you think of the fate of Israeli Jews and Palestinians as intertwined, I think it leads you to a very, very different way of thinking about ultimately how you deal with Gaza. But in moments like this, I have the feeling that, speaking that way, I’m just whistling into the wind. It’d be a little bit like people after 9/11 saying, “We have to understand the way that people in the Arab and Muslim world are experiencing American foreign policy and to understand the harm that’s being done as a result of what America does overseas.” It’s just very, very difficult, when people are so traumatized, to hear those things. They tend to respond to people who say those things by calling them traitors.
Are you dealing with any of that? I know you as a vocal opponent of Israeli policies. How have you been dealing with these images? Can you tell me about what you felt on Sunday and what you’ve been feeling since then?
Judaism, for me, fundamentally at its core, is about a tension between a religion that’s based on the metaphor of family—which I think is a bit different between Christianity and Islam, because we read, in the Book of Genesis, a story of a family that in exodus becomes a nation. So, we grow up with this idea to think of Jews as having familial obligations to one another. And yet Judaism also has a universal ethical message about the dignity of all people. And so maybe everybody in some way or another is balancing that tension, but for me, it’s fundamental to the way I think about this issue. How do I maintain a special obligation to my people but not at the cost of my ethical obligations to all people, and especially the Palestinians, because the Jewish state has inflicted such terrible trauma on them and continues to?
Sometimes there are moments when it seems like that tension can be resolved in creative ways and even in beautiful ways. And then there’s times like this, where the tension seems just overwhelming. I feel the imperative to speak critically about Israel’s role in what happened here—this didn’t happen [because] Palestinians are just some terrible other form of human beings. It’s fundamentally the result of the fact that the Palestinians have endured so much horror and trauma that they’re responding in this case in really, really terrible ways. I’m trying to balance that with a sense that I’m not losing touch with the necessity of solidarity. So, how do you show solidarity to a community that you are a part of, that you’re deeply, deeply connected to, and yet also be critical of it? In certain moments like this, I’m just struggling with it. We as a family have been talking about it all weekend. And it’s been really hard for us.
Do you expect international rules of war to be followed or enforced?
No, I don’t think so. Unfortunately, Israel hasn’t really shown that they are sympathetic to the perspectives of the U.N. or International Human Rights or any of those organizations, and I think even less so at this moment. And I think that’s really tragic. Israel is not alone in that. Many governments unfortunately behave that way. But I think that is one of the things that make the coming days so terrifying.
Do you see the United States playing any role here? I know the Biden administration has already issued a bunch of very strong statements, even deploying military aid and weaponry. But does the U.S. hold any sway? How do you see it playing a role in this?
The Biden administration wants to keep this from becoming a war with Hezbollah and a war with Iran. But the deeper problem is that the United States has allowed Israel to act with impunity going back for decades. And that is part of the reason that the blockade in Gaza has continued, that the occupation of the West Bank has deepened, and that has been terrible for Palestinians. It’s totally contrary to the kind of things that American leaders say about democracy and human rights and international law. And the rest of the world notices that.
I think, in the long run, it’s not great for Israelis either, because in the long term, maybe even in the medium term, you’re in a very small space where you’re living cheek by jowl with another group of people. Your safety and the safety of those other people is intertwined. This is a point that Martin Luther King tried to make to white America again and again when there were riots in American cities year after year in the ’60s. I think that’s the message of interconnectedness that is lost in a moment like this. And I think, ultimately, there’s no other way but recognizing the moral interconnectedness, which means you have to recognize that your family’s safety and dignity and freedom are dependent on you caring about the safety and dignity and freedom of Palestinians and vice versa.
What kind of impact will what’s happening to Israel right now have on the Israeli government, specifically its policies toward Palestine?
In the short term, there’s going to be this ground assault.
Netanyahu’s reputation as someone who was very skilled when it came to security has been very, very damaged by this. His was already a government that has produced a tremendous amount of animosity among Israelis. So, I think that this could produce a real, long-term dramatic political shift in Israel. A lot of people are comparing this to what happened in the Yom Kippur War because the Yom Kippur War was also considered a situation where Israel was completely caught asleep at the wheel, and it contributed to the end of the Labor Party’s homogeny, which collapsed after having existed since the beginning of the state.
I think one plausible scenario would be that this ultimately brings down not just this government but also the Likud hegemony that we’ve basically seen in Israel for the last couple of decades. But what replaces it is harder to know.
Do you have any advice for people who are being inundated online right now with massive amounts of gory images and information from the region?
My advice would be to try to make sure that you are accessing sources of information that focus on the humanity of both sides. Try to expose yourself to things that will force you to reckon with the humanity and suffering on both sides. Don’t choose. And also try to find voices, both of Palestinians and Israeli Jews, who you feel have a message of common humanity. There are people. There are actually a lot of them. And they’re extraordinary. It’s just that they are often really disempowered at a moment like this. But I think it’s at this moment that their voices are the most important.
