The effect of the October 7 atrocity and its aftermath upon Jews in the United States is the ostensible topic of Peter Beinart’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, “The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life.” Actually, Mr. Beinart demonstrates a rupture in the lives of Jewish leftists such as he, who discover that they can no longer be one with their non-Jewish comrades unless they denounce Zionism (i.e., the cause of Israel).  

Beinart tells American Jews (those calling themselves themselves liberals, at any rate) to oppose the continued existence of a Jewish nation and homeland in the Mideast. Beinart depicts Zionism as some kind of fetish that American Jews acquired after the 1967 Six-Day War. “[I]t came to dominate communal life only after Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 war exhilarated American Jews eager for an antidote to Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust.” Israel apparently never served that function at its founding or in the ensuing 19 years.

Quoting a leftist defender of the intifada, Beinart tells us that “American Jews…’have made of Israel an icon -- a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.’” No, the Torah places Israel at the center of the Jewish faith. It is there that Moses leads the Israelites after they are chosen to receive the Ten Commandments.

As noted by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in his Jewish Literacy (1991): “The most widely observed of all Jewish rituals, the Passover Seder, concludes with the call, ‘Next year in Jersusalem.’” And, as Telushkin reminds us, the 137^th Psalm proclaims, “’If I forget thee, O Jersusalem,/Let my right hand wither,/Let my tongue cleave to the roof of its mouth…’” There is no Judaism apart from Israel.

In such a document as John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” Sermon (1630), which President Reagan loved to cite, the founding of Israel is, moreover, associated with that of Western civilization in America. Winthrop said, “Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies… For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are upon us.”

And the sermon concludes “with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israell, Deut. 30. Beloved there is now sett before us life and good, Death and evill, in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walke in his ways and to keepe his Commandements and his Ordinances and his lawes, and the articles of our Covenant with him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whither wee goe to possesse it.” The uncultivated wilderness of America and that of ancient Israel, according to the will of the Almighty, were both to be the final destinations of itinerant peoples.

Why then, does Beinart condemn Israel? It is the Jewish homeland, so Moslems are not equal there. Of course, every nation recognizes a category of citizens and awards them prerogatives not granted mere visitors. We who are Americans cannot simply cross the border to Canada and expect to enroll our children in public school and vote in parliamentary elections. The fact that millions of people walking across the Mexican border seem to be acquiring precisely those rights in America does not make it sane or natural. And Arab citizens of Israel are indeed accorded equal rights, some serving in the Knesset.

The Mideast is composed of nations from which Jews are excluded or in which they cannot live without fear for their lives. Europe, including Britain and Ireland, is (once again) becoming saturated with virulent antisemitism. It has spread to the streets and university campuses of America and Canada. But Beinart objects to the existence of a tiny Jewish homeland on the Mediterranean shore, and objects to it on the ground of inequality!

To correct the inequality, Beinart requires that Israel cease being Israel, a Jewish nation, and turn into a hybrid called Israel-Palestine (“Yisrael-Falastin” in Hebrew or “Filastin-Isra’il” in Arabic). He indulges the fantasy that the Palestinians under their present leadership will let Jews live in peace alongside them. He sees no problem with the Palestinians yelling “From the River to the Sea” because the Israelis also want and at present have the land from the river to the sea. Beinart simply does not accept that Israel is a country, which its people will and must defend to the death.

Beinart is not especially original in his choice of falsehoods and omissions as he apportions blame for the Mideast conflict. Naturally, he does not mention that under the 1947 UN Resolution, the British colony was to be divided into Jewish and a Palestinian state. Which side declined to go along with that plan and made war instead? Beinart fails to acknowledge the subsequent opportunities for statehood offered the Palestinians, up to and including the Camp David meeting of 2000. The futility of such offers should tell us that the issue between these two sides was never the existence of a Palestinian state, it was always instead the existence of a Jewish state, regarded by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Iran, and all the Jihadist warriors as an infidel and foreign salient in what must be an exclusively Moslem Mideast.  

There is then Beinart’s ritual denunciation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government as right wing and racist. Would any of the Labor governments that held power in Israel from Ben Gurion to Golda Meier, or any subsequent ones, have reacted differently to the assault and atrocities of October 7? Indeed, what leader in the world, if his nation were capable of fighting back, would not have done so in such circumstances?

Beinart invokes the leftist canards that Moslems were persecuted in the United States after 9/11 and that Asians were persecuted because Republicans said that COVID came from a laboratory in the PRC. According to him, antisemitism now exists in America solely because of the iniquitous deeds of the IDF. Anyway, Beinart maintains, the mobs screaming for the intifada want to chase away Jews for ideological reasons, not out of antisemitism. Certainly, for anyone struck in the head, poked in the eye, pursued down the street, or forced to barricade himself in a school library, it is an inestimable consolation that Peter Beinart sees the mob’s motivation as merely ideology and not religious bigotry.  

But Jews must try to learn from their Palestinian peers, Beinart tells us. They must better understand the other point of view, which would be what? That the obliteration of Israel should be accomplished and the final solution completed when resistance is offered?

Beinart has to turn on Israel and dissemble with regard to Palestinian intentions if is to remain a true man of the Left. He accurately notes the partisanship of conservatives and of Trump supporters, in particular, for Israel and reasons syllogistically. What the Right favors is bad. The Right, for the most part, favors Zionism. Ergo, Zionism is bad. Better that the tongues of Jews “cleave to the [rooves] of [their] mouths” than that they be used to express concurrence with Donald Trump on anything.  

Image: New America