Has Zionism Become an Idol?

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

Has the state of Israel become an idol? 

In this interview, I discuss this and a variety of other questions with Peter Beinart, who is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a commentator for multiple news outlets. His newest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, details why he thinks Israel has become an idol and how this idolatry has resulted in the creation of an apartheid state.

Writing amid Israel’s genocide against Gaza, Beinart, who is Jewish, argues that worshipping the state of Israel elevates Jews over Palestinians and replaces “Judaism’s universal God—who makes special demands on Jews but cherishes all people—with a tribal deity that considers Jewish life precious and Palestinian life cheap.” The political ideology undergirding this idolatry is Zionism.

As Beinart notes in his newsletter, The Beinart Notebook, many who are critical of Zionism are often accused of being antisemitic. In the United States, Zionism is popularly and positively described as a political movement supporting Jewish statehood, which is seen as inseparable from Judaism.

But Beinart, who has been deeply influenced by the late literary critic and academic Edward Said, believes that Zionism is best understood from the standpoint of those who suffer it. Mohammed El-Kurd, who is a journalist, poet, and organizer in occupied Palestine, writes in Perfect Victims that Zionism “is an ideology of dispossession, an expansionist and racist settler-colonial enterprise. The Nakba, enduring and ongoing, remains the clearest crystallization of the Zionist ideology.”

In my interview with Beinart, we discuss his book, Christian Zionism and antisemitism, the Trump administration targeting activists who support Palestinian human rights, and the connections with the Exodus story he’ll be reflecting on during Passover.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: Your newest book is called Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I found out about it after watching Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. One of the central arguments of the book is that for some Jews, the state of Israel has become an idol. I think the same could be said for some Christians, too. Say more about what compelled you to use the language of idolatry.

Peter Beinart: I think I was struggling to understand the nature of the relationship between the organized American Jewish community and Israel. And people often use the word “support,” that the organized American Jewish community supports Israel.

But as I thought about it, I thought support didn’t quite capture it because I think support suggests that there is some external standard by which you might withdraw that support. So you support Israel if it does X, but not if it does Y. And I don’t think that’s actually the way things function.

I think what actually happens is that Israel is its own justification. Whatever Israel does, the organized American Jewish community comes up with a post hoc rationalization for that. So for instance, I think there was a period of time before the Trump plan, where if people had said that the Israeli government wanted a mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, the organized American Jewish community, Jewish leaders, would’ve said, “That’s outrageous. That’s a slander against Israel to say that.” But when Trump says it, and Netanyahu embraces it, and even many of Netanyahu’s political opponents embrace it, the response is not to say, “Oh my goodness, we are against this.”

So now it becomes, “Maybe it’s a good idea. After all, nothing else has worked.” This is what I mean by idolatry, which is to say that there is no external principle or external standard against which you’re judging the state, not international law and not the lives of the people under the control of the state.

Idolatry is the creation of something human made, and a state is something human made. In the Bible, there is a link between idolatry and terrible violence and barbarism against human beings. We see this connection today [in the saying] that Israel has an unconditional right to exist as a Jewish state, rather than saying the people under its control, half of whom are Palestinians, have the right to exist. The state has instrumental value if it’s protecting their lives. But if it’s not protecting their lives, if it’s destroying their lives, then in fact it’s their lives that have unconditional value and the state might need to be reimagined.

It seems as though the Trump administration equates advocating for Palestinian rights with being a supporter of Hamas or being antisemitic. What do you think about that association and that definition of antisemitism?

I think this is a really dangerous way of thinking about antisemitism. Antisemitism means discriminating against Jews or being hostile toward Jews because they’re Jews. But if you have criticisms of Israel, or you question the legitimacy of the state’s ideology because you believe that it’s violating human rights, that doesn’t make you antisemitic any more than it would make you anti-Muslim if you were leveling those criticisms at Iran or Saudi Arabia. The state must be criticized because states are self-interested actors.

To conflate Jews with the state is very dangerous, and what it ends up doing, in a really perverse way, is it dehumanizes Palestinians. Because if you say that to be opposed to the state, to be against Zionism makes you antisemitic, you’re basically calling all Palestinians antisemitic because their experience with this state would naturally incline them to have a very negative view of the state and its ideology.

The state was born with an act of mass expulsion of Palestinians. Then there was another act of mass expulsion in 1967. Palestinians have been under military law in the West Bank since 1967. Israel is called an apartheid state by the world’s leading human rights organizations and even by Israel’s human rights organizations.

If you were a Black South African and you were opposed to apartheid, would that make you an anti-Afrikaner bigot or an anti-white bigot? No. It would make you someone who was responding to the lived experience that you’d had. And then, if you call those people bigots, you’re doing something very perverse because you’re calling people bigots simply for wanting human equality.

Immigrants are being threatened with deportation because of their advocacy for Palestinian rights. What do you make of that?

I think that Donald Trump wants to create an authoritarian regime.

If you want to create an authoritarian regime, you try to take control of institutions that are not under your control. I think what Trump is doing is trying to seize control over institutions that are not under his power, and that could be sources of dissent or opposition.

He starts with elements of the federal government. He gets rid of all the inspector generals. He basically tells the Justice Department, you now have to act like my personal lawyers rather than following the rule of law. He attacks independent media; he’s attacking law firms that have had lawsuits against him.

Universities would naturally be on that list because they tend to be places that produce a lot of political dissent against people in power. I think that’s what Trump is doing.

I think this helps explain why he’s attacking Columbia University and why he’s attacking people like Mahmoud Khalil. Then, there is the question of why he’s using antisemitism. Because this is not actually a guy who has a lot of credibility on the subject of antisemitism, for goodness’ sakes. In 2016, he ran the most openly antisemitic ad of any American presidential candidate in history.

But I think the antisemitism pretext is useful because he knows that it will make it harder to fight back. Many people in the Democratic Party have already embraced this idea that protests for Palestinian freedom are antisemitic and, therefore, it’s a useful story to tell.

And that’s not to say there isn’t actual antisemitism on campuses. Of course there is. There is antisemitism just like there is misogyny and anti-Black racism and Islamophobia. But to equate antisemitism with the idea that Israel is doing something wrong in Gaza or that Palestinians deserve to be treated equally — I think Trump does that because he knows it will be harder for people to oppose him on that because of the way Palestinians are broadly dehumanized, including in the Democratic Party.

I was having a conversation with Jewish journalist and writer Zev Mishell, and he had said to me that one of the things that Christians need to wrestle with is how we can advocate for Palestinian human rights without falling into antisemitic tropes. What are some ways that you might recommend to Christians that we do that?

Look, it’s worth being humble about the legacy of Christian antisemitism. Sometimes it can be unconscious and there can be stereotypes and modes of discourse that one could participate in even if one didn’t entirely realize it, again just as one could with anti-Black racism or misogyny. These are very deep hatreds and they can become parts of our common culture.

But on the other hand, one can’t use that as a justification for surrendering one’s conscience. Human beings, regardless of their religion, have to be able to listen to their internal conscience. If you see what’s happening in Gaza, I think that there’s a natural and laudable response, which is to say there’s something wrong here. Most of the hospitals have been destroyed, most of the universities, most of the schools, most of the bakeries, most of the agriculture. People are starving to death, and there is a record number of child amputees. That’s got nothing to do with antisemitism and the history of Christian antisemitism.

We also need to remember that antisemitism is wrong because it treats Jews as lesser, right? And so surely the right response to antisemitism is not to treat Palestinians as lesser human beings. It’s to affirm the proposition that all people are equal in the eyes of God and deserve equal dignity.

I think, unfortunately, the sense of guilt and anxiety that exists about Christian antisemitism is leveraged sometimes by pro-Israel leaders. They just don’t want to have to have the argument, because it is really hard to defend what Israel’s doing. It’s much easier to level accusations of antisemitism than to actually have an honest conversation about how you justify a system that the country’s own human rights organizations are calling apartheid.

You write the following: “We demand that Palestinians produce Gandhis, and when they do, American Jewish organizations work to criminalize their boycotts and Israeli soldiers shoot them in the knees. No matter what strategy Palestinians employ in their fight for freedom, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies work to ensure that it fails.” I think if your assessment is correct, and I don’t have any reason to believe that it’s not, my question is, What hope do we have that things can actually change?

If there’s something that gives me hope, it’s that there is a movement growing in the United States and around the world. That is the movement for Palestinian freedom that sees this as a core moral issue of our time. It’s been beaten down by a lot of repression, and it doesn’t have that much political power in Washington, D.C. Money has a big influence in our American political system, and that can drown these voices out.

But I do think that we have a history of great moral movements that have been able to make things that might have seemed impossible in one moment of time become possible in another — the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-war movement in Vietnam — and I think this movement has some of those elements.

I think the kinds of people who in those previous eras were involved in those movements, many of them are now involved in this movement, and I think there’s a real grassroots power to it. And it’s bringing together a lot of Palestinians, a lot of Jews, a lot of younger Jews — many more, frankly, than the American Jewish organizations want to admit.

What is something from the Passover narrative that you’ll be reflecting on?

One of the things that I’ve always found fascinating about the Exodus story is the relationship of the Israelites to the land. This journey to the promised land has always made me wonder, Why do you need the Exodus story? Seems like a big detour, right? Because in the book of Genesis, this family that we believe becomes the Jewish people, the Benet Israel, the children of Israel, they’re already in the land. They’re in the land starting with Abraham, right? So, why do you need this narrative detour where there has to be the sale of Joseph, and then there’s a famine, and then all the brothers go, and then they end up being in Egypt? Why don’t they just stay there?

I think one of the commentaries on this that I’ve always found very powerful is the notion that because Genesis is really the story of the family, the Exodus in Jewish tradition becomes a story of a people or a nation. It’s not coincidental that transformation happens in slavery. It is supposed to imprint upon us, as Jews, a kind of memory of this experience of bondage and slavery.

And the famous medieval commentator Rashi says that it says 36 times in the Torah that we are supposed to remember the heart of the stranger because we are strangers in the land of Egypt. So there is something in this experience that is meant to sensitize us to the experience of bondage and being a stranger. And I think that’s part of the reason that so many groups of people around the world have seen this story and grafted it onto their historical experience.

But I also think it sends a message for Jews to ask ourselves: “Have we actually internalized this story? Are we remembering the stranger? And how are we acting towards the stranger?

When it comes to an issue as sensitive as the genocide in Palestine, and you are engaging with people who disagree with your position, how do you engage with them in a way that is charitable but also direct?

I try to think about what the mode of the interaction is. If you think about certain kinds of social media interactions, they become performative and involve a lot of one-upmanship. And I think even just emails and texts between people who have different points of view often become hostile and kind of point-scoring.

I think that conversations one-on-one, with people where there’s more time, where you have the time to listen, I think those are more constructive. I think it’s often really just valuable to ask people not just what they believe, but what are the life experiences that led them to those beliefs.

One of the things I say in the book is that I wish people who are passionate defenders of the Palestinian cause would interact with kids on college campuses or wherever who are very supportive of Israel. Take the time to learn something about their life experiences or family experiences. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna change your mind, but it does give you maybe a greater degree of empathy, and maybe it also gives you some insight into how to better articulate your views or what kind of views might be more effective. For me, I want to listen to people with different views partly because I might learn something that makes me reconsider something, but also I may get a better understanding of how they’re seeing the world. That might help me think about how I make my arguments in a way that might be more effective.

Can you point readers to some voices and outlets that are advocating for Palestinian rights from a Jewish perspective?

There’s Jewish Currents, the publication that I write for. There’s a publication in Israel/Palestine called +972 Magazine, which is really unique in that it’s genuinely a Palestinian and Israeli Jewish publication. They’ve done extraordinary work over the last year and a half.

There are religious figures: a writer named Mikhael Manekin who has created something called Smol Emuni, which means the faithful left. And now there’s a kind of American equivalent called the Halachic Left (“halachic” means Jewish law). So, these are people who are really trying to reconcile a progressive political outlook and a commitment to Palestinian freedom with Jewish law.

Who are some Palestinian voices you’d like to point our readers to?

There are so many extraordinary writers. Edward Said’s writing has had a big impact on me. I think especially of the book he wrote in 1977 called The Question of Palestine, which I think really, as he describes it, explains Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.

As someone who grew up thinking only about Israel in terms of what it meant for Jews, that was really revelatory. And I also think Said was a man who was passionately dedicated to the Palestinian cause but also not really by temperament a nationalist. He was always someone who held himself a little bit apart from movements. He allowed himself to be critical and have a critical eye toward even movements like the Palestinian cause that he believed were fundamentally just. But Said fell out with Yasser Arafat in his last days because he became critical of Arafat, which is not an easy thing for a Palestinian intellectual to do.

Two contemporary writers [who have influenced me] are from Gaza. One is named Muhammad Shehada — who I quote in my book — he’s just an incredibly penetrating and smart analyst when it comes to what’s actually happening in Palestinian society. He so effectively rebuts the kind of crude and racist notions of the ways Palestinians are written about.

And another is actually a young Palestinian Christian named Khalil Sayegh, who writes from the perspective of someone whose family has had negative interactions with Hamas. I was especially moved because Khalil’s father died during Israel’s assault on Gaza. His father was actually in a church, couldn’t get medical attention, and died. As I was watching the way Khalil responded — to see the depth of his Christian commitment at that moment — by writing on social media that his father’s legacy was to always see the preciousness of all life, even though his family and his father were denied that treatment. I just thought that was incredibly powerful to see the way he was able to maintain that vision of humanity even under those circumstances.