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In this interview with the Times Opinion editor Max Strasser, the journalist Peter Beinart explores what he calls the twin pillars of American Jewish life: Zionism and liberalism. Beinart argues that the two are fundamentally in conflict with each other, a longstanding tension that has become even more fraught since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel retaliated in Gaza. In this conversation, Beinart makes the case for liberalism over Zionism and calls on the American Jewish community to see that “Palestinian equality doesn’t need to be a threat to Jewish safety.”
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.
“The Opinions” is a collection of audio essays from Times Opinion. To listen to this piece, click the play button below.
Max Strasser: Peter, hi.
Peter Beinart: Hi.
Max Strasser: Your recent guest essay starts with the idea that there are two pillars of American Jewish life: liberalism and Zionism — progressive politics and support for Israel. Let’s start with the first one.
Tell me about where American Jews have tended to fall politically, at least until now. And in what ways have liberalism and Zionism been really integral to American Jewish identity?
Peter Beinart: Since American Jews came to the United States in large numbers in the early 20th century, they have identified on the left politically. Some of them came with socialist or communist backgrounds from Eastern Europe, and they merged that — certainly under Franklin Roosevelt — into American liberalism.
American Jews have voted for the Democratic Party in every presidential race since the 1930s in large numbers. They’ve been overrepresented in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the L.G.B.T. movement, the labor movement. And so this has been one of the things that I think defines how many American Jews see themselves, as a group of people who have a history of oppression and want to be on the side of other people who are struggling for equality.
Zionism was also a force in American Jewish life from the early 20th century, but it really became dominant after the 1967 war, when American Jews were filled with pride by Israel’s victory and felt that the sense of powerlessness of the Holocaust had in some ways been overcome by Israel’s military success. So starting in the 1970s, you really start to see that Zionism becomes a dominant ethos in American Jewish organizations. And those organizations also claim — most of them — that they are liberal organizations. So liberalism and Zionism sit alongside one another as the dominant creeds in American Jewish life.
Max Strasser: But there’s a tension here, right? American Jews celebrate Jewish participation in the civil rights movement. But Israel, which they have this great loyalty to, has certainly not lived up to the ideals that Martin Luther King promoted — democracy, equality, civil rights. So how did our community hold on to both liberalism and Zionism simultaneously for so long?
Peter Beinart: Yes, the two ideologies, if you think about them, are really quite dissonant with one another. American Jews have tended to support the idea of equal citizenship in a government that is secular and doesn’t prefer any racial or religious group. But Zionism — certainly the political Zionism that has structured the Israeli state since Israel’s creation — is based on the idea that this is a state essentially for Jews, for the safety and representation, above all, of Jews.
I think that American Jews were able to hold those two ideologies together because there were not strong voices pointing out the illiberalism of Zionism in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, but in the last decade or so, I think that’s begun to change.
Max Strasser: I think that’s especially true since Oct. 7. Oct. 7 was, to me, the most seismic event in Israel-Palestine in my lifetime. I don’t know if you feel the same way. It’s really changed the trajectory of the conflict and how we talk about it. Part of that is because of the horror of Hamas’s attack and how that’s shaken people. But it’s also because of the way Israel has responded: As of right now, more than 32,000 Palestinians killed, and Gaza is on the brink of a famine that humanitarian agencies say Israel could prevent. Do you think that’s part of what’s changing the conversation also?
Peter Beinart: I think there were changes that were underway before Oct. 7, but they’ve been accelerated.
For the last decade or so, roughly, you could say the American left has been moving in a more pro-Palestine direction. Interestingly, if you go back decades earlier, Israel was often considered a leftist cause in the United States. But as Israel has moved to the right politically, more people on the left, I think, have started to identify with the Palestinian cause. But it wasn’t necessarily a dominant political issue until Oct. 7.
What Oct. 7 did was put this issue on the front page. The pro-Palestine sentiment that existed among kind of leftist activists all of a sudden went from being one of their concerns to being among their top concerns. That has produced a really unprecedented movement for Palestinian rights and against this war on the left, and that has started to change the culture of many of the institutions in which Jews reside. This leftist pro-Palestine politics has started to change American liberalism in ways that make it harder and more uncomfortable to hold liberalism and Zionism alongside one another.
Max Strasser: What does this shift mean for mainstream Jewish institutions that remain committed to Zionism?
Peter Beinart: I think mainstream American Jewish organizations that see their fundamental goal as protecting Israel are seeing that liberalism and the Democratic Party are becoming less hospitable.
Yes, there are many Democratic politicians, like Joe Biden, who are still very, very pro-Israel. But the Jewish organizations can see that at the grass roots of the Democratic Party, especially among younger people, there’s been a dramatic shift. They can see that pro-Palestine activism is really growing. And so they are responding by making a kind of an alignment with forces on the political right because the pro-Israel consensus remains strong in the Republican Party and because Republicans have their own reason for wanting to try to suppress this leftist pro-Palestine activism. They identify it with a larger agenda, which they call woke, which they see as a threat.
Max Strasser: You write in the essay that this alliance that’s forming between Zionist institutions and Republicans and other forces on the right — it’s an uncomfortable one for a lot of American Jews. Can you talk a little bit about how liberal Zionists are trying to make sense of that and reconcile that tension?
Peter Beinart: Yes, it’s uncomfortable because most American Jews are still voting for the Democratic Party and seeing themselves in some ways as liberals. But the institutions that speak for them are moving into closer alignment with the Republican Party.
For instance, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, probably the most powerful pro-Israel, largely Jewish organization, endorsed a large number of insurrectionists — people who did not support certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory — and that’s very uncomfortable for many American Jews. But for the time being, I think they are able to still hold these two things because there are enough pro-Israel Democrats in politics that they can still support. But I think that in the years to come, there may be fewer of those and that holding these two things will be harder.
Max Strasser: We’ve talked about the uncomfortable alliance that’s happening on the right, but what about on the other side? The Palestine solidarity movement, it’s definitely growing. It’s growing rapidly. It’s growing in the amount of attention that it gets. But how do you think progressive Jews fit in?
Peter Beinart: On the one hand, there are a substantial number of Jews who are in the Palestine solidarity movement now through groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. But that movement, as it’s growing stronger, has also been growing more radical.
I think it’s been radicalized by Israel’s move to the right and now by this destruction of Gaza, which is making people so, so upset. And so what we’re seeing in the Palestine solidarity movement is that the language of equal coexistence, which was stronger a couple of decades ago, has receded a bit in Palestine discourse. That’s not to say that the movement is saying, “The Jews need to be kicked out of Israel.” We’re not hearing that. But there’s not a vision that’s being articulated that actually explains where Israeli Jews really fit into a vision of Palestine liberation.
I think that puts the Jews in this movement in a slightly awkward place. They want to oppose the war. They want to support Palestine liberation, as I do myself. And yet I urge in this essay that they should be willing to speak out in defense of a vision of coexistence that explains where Israeli Jews fit into this vision of Palestinian liberation.
Max Strasser: I’m going to take advantage of the fact that you mentioned your own views here, and I want to ask you a question. You wrote this landmark piece in 2010 in The New York Review of Books about the failure of the American Jewish establishment, and a decade later, you wrote a piece for The Times called “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.” What has your experience been like, making that ideological migration?
Peter Beinart: Yeah, I guess you could say the essay in some ways is a little bit autobiographical because I, for most of my adult life, identified myself as a liberal and also as a political Zionist, someone who supports a Jewish state. And over time, I felt like I was forced to reconsider that because there seemed no prospect of Palestinians getting their own state alongside Israel but also because the notion of group supremacy — of Jewish supremacy — started to become more and more uncomfortable to me as I noticed how similar it was to the voices in America who were talking about maintaining a demographic majority and seemed to have a vision of first- and second-class citizens.
It was really through reading and listening to Palestinians who had for a long time been making these deeper critiques that I began to move toward the idea that I should try to square my support for equality under the law in America with the vision of equality under the law in Israel-Palestine.
It hasn’t always been an easy or comfortable journey. At times it’s been quite a painful one. But I felt like, as a writer, I had to go with where my mind and my heart were taking me if I was going to be able to write with any integrity. And although it has ruptured some relationships for me, as it has for other American Jews who’ve gone on my path, it’s also led to a new set of relationships that I couldn’t quite have imagined. And those are very gratifying to me.
Max Strasser: In your essay you quote Adam Shatz of The London Review of Books talking about this double homelessness of anti-Zionist and post-Zionist Jews and how that’s a really uncomfortable place to be a lot of the time. There’s a lot of discomfort all around here, isn’t there?
Peter Beinart: Yeah, there is. And I can’t — you know, everyone has to figure that out for themselves. For me, at a personal level, what I try to remember is that I see the Jewish community as a kind of imagined extended family. And so you have responsibilities to maintain connections to that extended family, just like to your immediate family, even if you have very, very deep disagreements.
And it’s important to try to find the points of commonality. And I also think it’s really important that while American Jews need to listen very carefully to Palestinians — and I have learned, myself, so deeply from reading Palestinians — it’s also important for us to remember that Palestinians are not a monolith. And that even though Israel is oppressing Palestinians, it doesn’t mean that Jews don’t have the right to have our own opinions and our own moral visions and that we have something to contribute to this discourse that I hope would bring the liberation of both peoples.
Max Strasser: Speaking of the Jewish community broadly — the extended family, as you described it — what do you hope that the community prioritizes in the future?
Peter Beinart: I hope that in the future, more people will look at the tensions and come to see that there is a real danger if we make an exception for Israel from our general liberal principles.
The danger is that if we say, “Yes, we believe in equality under the law everywhere, but we need to make an exception for Israel because we’re a small people who have been persecuted and we can’t afford it,” then it makes it easier for other people to say they want those same exceptions, whether it’s in India, whether it’s in Hungary, whether it’s in the United States.
And then we are, it seems to me, able to really be on the side of a global struggle for equality under the law against the forces of ethnonationalism and supremacy that are powerful everywhere.
So I would hope that more American Jews, as uncomfortable as it is, would look at these contradictions and also find ways of overcoming this deep-seated fear that we have of Palestinians. Often a fear that’s, I think, enhanced by the fact that there isn’t much engagement between Jewish institutions and Palestinians. I hope we see that Palestinian equality doesn’t need to be a threat to Jewish safety, that in the long term, actually, that Jews may be more safe living alongside Palestinians who are free and equal than Palestinians who are subjugated.
Max Strasser: Peter, thanks for doing this.
Peter Beinart: My pleasure.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Efim Shapiro. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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