Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza
Peter Beinart, Knopf, £17.99

I BEGAN to read this book as the governments of Canada, France and Britain publicly declared that the Palestinian people’s suffering under Israel’s 19-month onslaught is intolerable.

As a live-streamed genocide in Gaza unfolds, the author focuses on the roles of Judaism and zionism amid Israeli expansion via Uncle Sam’s military aid wrapped in, according to him, “the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams.”

A cynic might say that this recent opposition is more about public relations to shield the global public from images of Palestinian kids being killed and starved in Gaza. This is a high-tech enclosure of the commons, eg, Palestinian land loss to the state of Israel via US proxy for the benefit of a geopolitical order of, by and for private investors.

There is an historical process linked to Israel’s state violence against Palestinians that benefits capitalist interests seeking to grow on the rebuilding and repopulating of Gaza. Crucially, it is on the public’s radar screen, thanks to President Donald Trump’s transactional rhetoric. His declaration about the beautiful future awaiting private developers and financiers in the beachfront property of Gaza when the Palestinians are removed, once seen, can’t be unseen.

Beinart focuses on the clash between Judaism and zionism. To this end, he critiques the supremacist ideology of zionism, legitimated with a false equation to Judaism, a religion. In today’s context of social media communication and saturation, zionism as a dominant narrative is facing perhaps its biggest legitimation challenge from US Jews of a younger generation. Beinart is tuned into this contradiction.

I see Beinart’s take on a moral revolt against zionism in the context of a far-right political trend to replace democratic liberalism with autocratic extremism. The dual trends are two sides of the same coin, ruling beliefs and practices of a system destroying planetary society from the Amazon rainforest to the Arctic Sea and all points in between. For example, the US military-industrial complex, directly and by proxy in the case of Israel, is the leading generator of carbon emissions cooking the planet.

At the end of the day, Beinart’s view of the state’s role in capitalist societies — in and out of Israel — to guide the growth of private investment limits his view of liberation solutions for the oppressed and oppressors. Thus his advocacy for a spiritually Jewish solution to US-backed Israeli-led forever wars in the Middle East is, in my view, a necessary but insufficient step.

In his book, for instance, he cites, favorably, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose take on the role of individuals in capitalist society includes the statement: “Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, [and] in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” However, the capitalist class controls the state and its legal use of violence. Poor and working-class people, unless and until they organise, lack a countervailing power to change the policies and politics of a capitalist state, waging forever wars against the biosphere and humanity.

There are limits to a moral argument for peace and social justice amid the current moment of ecological and social decay. Changing the foreign policy of the US political system, for example, requires mass mobilisation making demands on the state — such as healthcare and livable wages for all versus genocidal warfare in Gaza. Faith-based citizens certainly have a part to play.

Jewish communities can and are playing a role in such a transition, a process that Beinart is a part of — not apart from — as an academic and author with access to mainstream media. Faith-based groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the grassroots organisations of Rvd William Barber II, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, lead the way, along with other like-minded US advocates such as Public Citizen and the Council of American-Islamic Relations, that are fed up with business as usual and pressing for structural social change that puts people before profits.

Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild.