A Conversation With Peter Beinart

Last week, I spoke with Peter A. Beinart, one of American Jewry’s most prominent critics of Israel and, incidentally, a parent at the Jewish day school I attended. During a recent visit Beinart paid to Harvard to talk about the war between Israel and Hamas, I sat down with him to speak about how he understands Oct. 7 and its aftermath, in the region, in the United States, and, yes, on Harvard’s campus.

In many ways, Beinart both embodies and straddles the divide among diaspora Jews. He studies Talmud daily and sends his kids to a school that is proudly Zionist. He has proclaimed the death of the two-state solution and said he no longer believes in a Jewish state. Beinart has faced harsh criticism from corners of the Jewish community more closely aligned with Israel while receiving praise from its left-leaning wing. Rabbi David J. Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, accused Beinart of “whitewashing” the “unremitting hostility of Israel’s neighbors,” while the president of the liberal Israel advocacy group J Street called him “the troubadour of our movement.”

The following interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

CMC: Let’s begin by talking about what your conversations about Israel with other Jews have looked like since Oct. 7. What kind of response to your views have you felt from the Jewish community?

PAB: So in the spaces where I spend more of my time — partly just because of my age, but also because I tend to be in fairly affiliated spaces, even Orthodox spaces — my views are a pretty small minority. It’s hard to try to express to people that my very fundamental differences with them about what Israel has done after Oct. 7, with some very basic elements of the way Israel is as a state, don’t reflect a lack of concern for the welfare of Jews in Israel and Jews around the world, but are actually my best effort to take positions that I believe will lead to greater safety for us. And I think my ability to convince people in more affiliated Jewish spaces and people my age and older — that’s a pretty tough sell. And there’s a lot of anger, as there always is.

On the other hand, I’ve also been struck by the mobilization of another set of American Jews who tend to be younger, tend to be less affiliated with organized communities, who have been at the forefront of the movement against the war. I do think that there is something akin to a kind of ideological civil war among American Jews that was latent before Oct. 7, but it’s become much more intense since.

CMC: I think an important part of the story since Oct. 7 are Jewish groups, mainly younger people, who have been very supportive of the Palestinians.

You’ve spoken about the connection between Jewish Voice for Peace and combating antisemitism, saying “they are actually showing that this is a struggle of a group of people—Palestinians, Jews, and other people—for a set of principles” and that they “combat pro-Palestinian antisemitism.”

JVP’s press statement on Oct. 7 said, “inevitably, oppressed people everywhere will seek — and gain — their freedom.” Their official X account reposted a picture of a bulldozer knocking over a border fence on Oct. 7 captioned, in part, “goosebumps.” Do you worry that those Jewish groups are crossing the line into celebration or justification of violence?

PAB: I think that their basic idea is that Israeli Jewish safety depends on Palestinian safety and Palestinian safety can depend on Palestinian freedom. And I think from the very beginning, they were correct. I’ve heard from Palestinians again and again: That is one of the best ways of fighting against antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian movement, because it makes it clear that this is not a struggle of tribe versus tribe.

CMC: I have to say, I found that reaction to Oct. 7 horrific. It’s not something I can just look past and say “Well, you know, they’re doing other things that might be on the side of justice.”

PAB: First of all, there’s a difference between seeing the bulldozer knocking down a fence which makes Gaza an open air prison — this is the term that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International use, you basically had millions of people penned in, herded into this very small territory for more than 15 years — and then justifying in any way the killing of civilians that was done after people came out. I think that distinction is important to make.

And for goodness sake, the amount of celebration that we have seen of Israel’s slaughter that’s taken place should also give people a lot of pause. This is not something that is restricted by any means to the pro-Palestinian side. I am against a celebration of violence. And I’m certainly profoundly against celebrating violence against civilians.

CMC: I think many Jews were repulsed by that JVP reaction. You spoke about it being a bulldozer, but we know those militants went on to kill civilians and rape women. I think for many Jews, that was a turn-off, and not something that was reconcilable.

PAB: For some Jews, yes. There are Jews like me who find things that the pro-Palestinian side have said objectionable and also find things that Israel and the United States government have done objectionable. I think we have to be careful about making broad assertions about what American Jews believe.

Even before Oct. 7, the polling suggested that close to 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 saw Israel as an “apartheid state.” So there is a very, very large gulf, and a very wide spectrum, and I think there are many, many Jews who may have been upset about things that were said after Oct. 7, but who are genuinely horrified seeing that our community is supporting something that even Omer Bartov, a former Israeli Defense Force soldier and one of the world’s great Holocaust scholars, has warned could be a genocide.

People who are oppressed don’t because they are oppressed become angels, and their supporters are not angels. It doesn’t mean that the oppression is okay. And the idea that denying people their basic human rights is okay is the actual position of the organized American Jewish community — I’m fine if people want to criticize statements that Palestinians and their supporters have made, but the question I would ask is “What are you doing to create a safer environment for Israelis and Palestinians?”

CMC: Turning to antisemitism on campus, there’s been a lot of talk about its rise since Oct. 7, especially at Harvard. You’ve said “the descriptions of the kind of antisemitism that is supposedly happening on college campuses is completely divorced from actual reality… There’s no discussion in the hearings whatsoever of any context about what’s happening in Gaza that might help to explain why anyone on a campus might be upset at Israel right now.”

Many of my friends and I have personally experienced antisemitism. We’ve been on television and written op-eds about this issue. What do you mean when you say “the descriptions are divorced from reality?”

PAB: I was talking about the congressional hearing. The point I was making is you would never know from that hearing that a single Palestinian had died. So you would have no reason to understand why anyone on a college campus might be upset at Israel. It was completely decontextualized because those Republicans in the congressional hearing really could not care less about Palestinian life. That’s the point I was making.

CMC: But, I mean, you spoke about Jewish Americans as a whole preferring to talk about antisemitism over the war in Gaza. Do you believe that discourse around antisemitism is a purposeful attempt not to talk about what’s happening in Gaza?

PAB: I’m talking about American Jewish organizations, for instance, the Anti-Defamation League — I can’t get inside their heads. What I can notice is there is a tremendous amount of focus on antisemitism and a definition of antisemitism that I think is fundamentally wrong, which equates it with anti-Zionism and then turns essentially all Palestinians into antisemites. And I would say there is a complete, overwhelming evasion of the moral questions that are engaged with this slaughter in Gaza.

CMC: I want to read you a quote from the national Students for Justice in Palestine toolkit which said, in response to Oct. 7, that Palestinians are “liberating our colonized land from illegal settlements and military checkpoints, our people are actualizing revolution. Palestine will be liberated from the river to the sea.” What would you say to Jewish and Israeli students who hear “from the river to the sea” being used in reference to an attack like Oct. 7 and feel frightened by that kind of language?

PAB: You’re at an educational institution, so the point is to learn from one’s faculty and learn from one’s fellow students. So it seems to me that you might make the assumption that the vision is of a Palestine in which Jews are all killed. I think it’s important to ask people engaged in that question “do you believe that Israeli Jews should have the right to live equally alongside Palestinians?” And likewise, I think that Palestinian activists should be able to ask pro-Israel students “do you believe Palestinians should be able to live equally alongside Jews?” Because the reality is, right now, they don’t.

CMC: That toolkit is drawing a direct connection between the attack on Oct. 7, which was the wanton murder of Jews, and “from the river to the sea.”

PAB: Then the point that I’m making is it’s useful to listen to Palestinians. Not because you’re necessarily going to agree with them, but because, in most American Jewish institutions, people listen to Palestinians very little. So if you see a snippet of a Tweet that is concerning to you, then it seems to me the right thing to do — especially when you’re lucky enough to be on a college campus, where you are in close proximity to Palestinian students — is actually to ask people what they mean by those things. That’s the process of education that I think we should want.

CMC: But in that example, they make the direct connection to the attack on Oct. 7. Does that disturb you at all?

PAB: As I said, I’m disturbed by any justification of the killing of civilians on Oct. 7. I also know pro-Palestine activists on this very campus, whom I’ve talked to repeatedly, who I know believe very strongly in the principle of equality and mutual coexistence. And so, it seems to me that it’s lazy for people to simply listen to a tweet and then not actually take the additional steps and actually try to engage people and ask them these questions. Through that process of learning, they may also learn something from you.

Charles M. Covit ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Holworthy Hall.