In the Hebrew Biblical exegesis known as the Midrash, there is a story about the great saint and sage Rabbi Meir and the man the Rabbi took lessons in theology from, Elisha ben Abiyuh, also called Akher (‘Other’). Akher was a heretic who observed no Jewish ritual, but that did not stop Rabbi Meir, the pillar of Mosaic orthodoxy, from being his student. Once on a Sabbath Rabbi Meir was with his teacher, and as usual, they became engaged in an absorbing discussion. The heretic was riding a horse, and Rabbi Meir, as he could not ride on a Sabbath, walked by Akher’s side, listening so intently to the great teacher that he failed to notice that they had reached the limit of two thousand cubits beyond which a Jew was not supposed to walk on a Sabbath. At that point, the heretic turned to his Orthodox pupil and said: “Look, we have reached the boundary, and we must part now. You mustn’t accompany me any farther – so go back!” Whereupon Rabbi Meir went back to the Jewish community, while the heretic rode on – beyond the boundaries of Jewry. ‘Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,’ Peter Beinart, Alfred a Knopf, 2025.Why does A Note to my Former Friend, the preamble to Peter Beinart’s remarkable recent book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, foreground this intriguing story? It does so to remind us that strong disagreement, even dissent, has been part of the Jewish tradition. The leading light of Orthodox Jewry did not hesitate to take his lessons from a heretic, nor to defend the rebel against other rabbis. And Rabbi Meir and Acher never failed to respect and have great affection for each other. Beinart knows that his very public opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has alienated him from vast swathes of American and Israeli Jews. “When I enter a synagogue, I am no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away…I worry that given the trajectory of events in Israel and Palestine, we may be moving past disagreement, towards hatred”. And that’s a prospect Beinart agonises over. He still hopes that he and his ‘former friends’ can all dip into the reservoir of forbearance and magnanimity that is part of their Jewish inheritance, and hear one another out with respect. He reminds himself and those he disagrees with of the obligations they, as Jews, bear to one another, an obligation underscored by the extraordinary story of Rabbi Meir and Acher. Personal historyPeter Beinart is an Orthodox Jew who keeps kosher, is a regular at his community synagogue in New York, a city where he is professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, and sent his two children to a Jewish day school. ‘The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again,’ Peter Beinart, Harper, 2006.Born in 1971, he had begun life as a Zionist, albeit a liberal Zionist, but his weltanschaung was not necessarily that of a political liberal. As editor of The New Republic, he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a position he clarified in 2010 as having been prompted by a concern, later proved unfounded, that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. In his 2006 book The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and only Liberals – can win the War on Terror and make America Great Again, Beinart defended muscular intervention by the US in other countries, mainly to contain what he then considered “the threat of Islamic totalitarianism”, a position he has walked back from since then. By 2012, when he published his book The Crisis of Zionism, Beinart’s views on Zionism, and specifically on the state of Israel, had shifted significantly: he was no longer sure that a state could be both Jewish and democratic at the same time, and he was now sensitive to the idea that the Israeli state under Netanyahu-led Likud Party was inconsistent with liberalism. An ardent advocate of the two-state solution for Israel-Palestine until then, misgivings assailed him now: why have a Jewish state in the first place, knowing that it’s an anachronism? ‘The Crisis of Zionism,’ Peter Beinart, Picador, 2013.In a New York Times op-ed written in 2020, headlined ‘I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State‘, Beinart went on record with his rejection of an exclusively Jewish Israel. He was now veering around to envisioning a unified state where Jews and Palestinians enjoyed equal citizenship rights and lived at peace with one another.What triggered this rather dramatic change in outlook was his sense that, the way the Israeli state, and indeed Israeli society itself, is organised now, it’s unlikely to allow an independent Palestinian state to exist in peace. That being so, doesn’t it beg the other, more serious, question: how then do we visualise a single state incorporating Jews and Palestinians as equal citizens? An important part of Being Jewish… is taken up with answering that question. And Beinart goes about finding that answer by locating the question within recent historical experience. Retelling familiar narrativesBut Beinart’s advocacy of a unified state of Israel-Palestine is framed around a dramatic retelling of the Zionist narrative of Jewish exceptionalism. Not only does Being Jewish… pivot on a searing indictment of Israel’s carnage in Gaza post October 2023, it scans segments of Jewish history and Jewish scriptures to bare uncomfortable truths. Beinart’s survey gives the lie to several carefully-cultivated myths: for example, that, throughout history, Jews have always been victims, never oppressors. In chapter one, ‘They Tried to Kill Us We Survived, Let’s Eat’, Beinart reviews the cultural lore surrounding the very popular Jewish festival of Purin which derives from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Esther. It’s a story that revolves around Esther, Jewish queen to a dissolute Persian king, and her great feat of saving countless Jewish lives from a cruel royal edict to exterminate Jews. The feast on the Purin holiday is now believed to celebrate that very happy episode. However, this is really a censored – or, at any rate, elided – version of the Book of Esther which goes on to narrate how, after the Jewish queen saves Jewish lives, Jews turn on Persians, ‘slaying and destroying’ them, and “wreak(ing) their will upon them”. On the 13th day of the month of Adar, the Jews slaughter fully 75,000 people. They make the 14th day “a day of feasting and merrymaking”, and that’s really what Purin celebrated. Today, however, the festival showcases only Jewish survival, altogether blotting out the memory of the blood the Jews shed before they sat down to the original Purin feast. The narrative of permanent Jewish victimhood is one of the most potent weapons in modern Zionism’s armoury. But “(w)e are not history’s permanent virtuous victims,” Beinart reminds his readers. “We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defence. It exempts Jews from external judgement. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings”.This trope of ‘virtuous victimhood’ helps mask Zionism’s colonial ambitions, but the early Zionists never made a secret of their colonising propensities, because unlike now, their time did not look at colonisation with disfavour. When Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, wrote in 1902 to Cecil Rhodes, the man who helped colonise much of southern Africa, he solicited Rhodes’s help on the ground that Zionism was also “something colonial”. In 1948, the newly-formed Israel Defence Force named one of the key battles of what’s known as Israel’s war of independence ‘Operation Ben-Nun’. That name ties in with the man – Joshua Ben-Nun – who, per the Bible’ Book of Joshua, led the Israeli conquest of Canaan from the seven nations that had lived there until then. Modern-day Jewish discourse, however, conveniently glosses over the Book of Joshua (with its theme of conquest), focusing attention on the books of Genesis and Exodus instead, and avers that “(t)he Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel and first achieved self-determination there 3,000 years ago” (in the American Jewish Congress’s words), without ever explaining how that ‘self-determination’ came to be in the first place. The founders of the Israeli state were not coy about likening their exploits to Joshua’s battle of conquest, though contemporary advocay of the Jewish state steers well clear of such inconvenient linkages. A settler-colonial stateBeinhart repeatedly stresses the settler-colonial nature of Israel, and posits the violence committed by Hamas on October 7 and other occasions as armed resistance of a colonised people, on a par with Haitians’, Creek Indians’, or Mau Mau rebels’ violence against their colonial oppressors. In the chapter titled ‘To Whom Evil Is Done’, he demolishes the high-octane comparisons of October 7 to the Holocaust, or to the pogroms against Jews in pre-war Eastern Europe. Drawing such reckless parallels between two entirely dissimilar categories of violence “transforms Palestinians from a subjugated people into the reincarnation of the monsters of the Jewish past” and is wholly unconscionable. Indeed, earlier generations of Zionists knew better than claiming such false equivalences, Beinhart reminds us, because they were far less invested in the idea of Jewish innocence. “Every native population in the world”, wrote Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideological forefather of Netanyahu’s Likud Party,” resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised…That’s what the Arabs in Palestine are doing”. “For eight years they (the Palestinians) have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza,” said Moshe Dayan, Israel’s chief of army staff, “and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estates”. Dayan was speaking in 1956, after Palestinians had ambushed and killed a young Israeli security officer in Gaza. He was not, of course, condoning the murder, but he knew where such acts were coming from. So, “(l)et us not cast the blame on the murderers today,” Dayan declared. But what chance of success can a scrupulously non-violent Palestinian resistance hope for? Virtually none, Beinart writes, pointing to how Israel criminalised the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and successive US presidencies execrated BDS. He also cites the 2018 Great March of Return when perfectly peaceful Palestinian marchers were indiscriminately fired upon by Israeli snipers, killing over 220 and maiming more than 8,000 protesters. In his penultimate chapter (‘The New New Antisemitism’) Beinart makes the following point forcefully:“The whole point of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is to depict Palestinians and their supporters as bigots, thus turning a conversation about the oppression of Palestinians into a conversation about the oppression of Jews.”The state above god?After his take-down of the Israeli-Jewish narratives of virtuous victimhood and absolute moral inculpability, Beinart turns in his final chapter (‘Korach’s Children’) to the moral-intellectual muddle that helps spawn these fantasies: the chosenness of the Jews enshrined in the Hebrew Bible. With the great Orthodox libertarian Yeshayahu Liebowitz, Beinart believes that biblical chosenness is not about the Jews’ superiority to others in any way, but that, being Jewish, they owe a special set of obligations to non-Jews. The prophets never told the Jewish people that they can do no wrong, but that “because they have a unique relationship with God…their wrongs can never be excused”. The whole idea of chosenenss is therefore turned on its head if it’s interpreted to mean infallibility. Which brings us to the sanctity of the Jewish state, an article of faith today for mainstream Jewish opinion, whether in Israel or across diaspora groups. Binart believes – and copiously illustrates why – this signifies moral bankruptcy as well as being tantamount to idolatry, one of the worst sins in the Judaistic canon. Idolising the state – any state, Jewish or otherwise – is anathema to Judaism in as much as it seeks to treat the state on a par with God, while states really derive their legitimacy from God’s law. Inevitably, Beinart suggests, the apotheosis of the Jewish state has precipitated a moral crisis in Israeli society, with most citizens oblivious to – many even exultant over – the indescribable suffering Israel has unleashed on Palestinians. Rising settler violence in the West Bank is further testimony to a lost moral compass.Not two states, but oneThe impasse can only be broken, Beinart is convinced, by birthing a unified Israel-Palestine “from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea,” or a confederation of two autonomous states, one Jewish-majority and the other, Arab-majority. This integration will necessarily be an extended, even often painful, process, but this can be the only just and humane resolution to the crushing power asymmetries riling the region. Aware that, at this point, such a solution has implausibility written all over it, Beinart invites attention to recent historical precedents: South Africa and Northern Ireland. Both those geographies were trapped in sectarian and racial violence for many decades, and the faultlines between warring communities ran deep and long. Indeed, up until their resolution, the problems in both apartheid South Africa and Protestant-majority Northern Ireland looked truly insurmountable. And yet, three decades after pathways to peace and (relative) stability had been found out of the gridlock, both countries showcase communities coexisting civilly under formal democracies. In a moving obituary to his Jewish South African grandmother (Haaretz, 2 July, 2014), Beinart recalls how he, as a teenager, used to argue with that kindly old woman that Jews had a particular obligation to combat apartheid. She disagreed, not because she hated Black Africans (which she apparently didn’t), but because, like most White South Africans then, she was convinced that the safety and happiness of the Whites was tied to segregation. White South Africans equated “racial integration with national suicide”, just as many Israeli Jews view integration with Palestinians as suicide today, Beinart reminds us. Mercifully, such horrible prognostications are almost always proved wrong. Like the Jewish scholar Marc Ellis before him, Beinart sees the unification of Israel-Palestine not only as a political game-changer but also as the necessary first step towards a moral renewal of Israeli society, indeed of Jews as a whole. When Beinart writes that, by liberating Palestinians from the yoke of dehumanising tyranny, “(w)e can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world”, he is echoing Ellis’s ringing words:“The central question is how to move Jews in Israel and around the world to see that Jews can only be free if Palestinians can be free as well.”The invocation of classical Jewish humanism, as old as it is deep, vests Beinart’s message with striking nobility. Being Jewish… is an outstanding contribution to the literature on Israel-Palestine and on the Jewish intellectual-moral tradition in general. And yet one feels ever so slightly uneasy that this very important book probably idealises its proclaimed target audience – Jews in Israel and elsewhere, who see legitimacy in Israel’s murderous project in Gaza and the West Bank. All recent polls suggest that a large majority of Israelis are inured to the carnage their government is inflicting on Gaza and are overwhelmingly in support of the genocide. Is a good faith dialogue really possible when such a deep and wide chasm separates the two sides to the dialogue? Rather, aren’t we willy-nilly driven to Marc Ellis’s shattering realisation, articulated in a 2018 interview, that we are looking at the “end of ethical Jewish history”?Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.