Peter Beinart spoke Monday on the ongoing war in Gaza and its implications for Jewish identity, sharing his personal and political reckoning with the narratives that have shaped Jewish thought on Zionism and Palestinian humanity.
The lecture was moderated by Atalia Omer, a professor of religion, conflict and peace studies at Notre Dame.
Beinart, a professor at the City of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and frequent contributor to The New York Times and MSNBC, discussed the ideological transformations he has undergone, challenging deeply entrenched views on Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.
Beinart spoke about his recent book, "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza," which explores what he describes as the necessity of unlearning a historical narrative that denies Palestinian political rights and humanity. In the book, he argues that for decades, the Jewish establishment has urged American Jews to compartmentalize their liberal values when it comes to Israel.
In his lecture, he noted the dehumanizing effects of this ideology and explained that young Jewish people are increasingly rejecting Zionism itself rather than compromising their commitment to universal human rights.
“Palestinians were always talked about, but never listened to,” he said. “They were treated as a faceless, threatening collective rather than as individual human beings.”
He described his own evolving awareness of the brutality of Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, acknowledging that he was unprepared for the extent of Palestinian suffering and the way he had internalized dismissive attitudes toward them.
Beinart addressed the events of Oct. 7, calling the attack “an act of horrifying violence” and condemning the targeting of civilians as profoundly immoral. However, he emphasized the need for a deeper diagnosis of the conditions in Israel-Palestine that led to such violence.
“You erase Palestinian humanity and you turn Oct. 7 into just a story of antisemitic barbarism,” he said, “which then becomes the justification for the terrible, terrible violence that we’ve seen since and that indeed seems now prone to even escalate.”
He was particularly critical of the way discourse has been shaped to justify Israeli military actions. The claim that Hamas uses human shields, he noted, follows the same logic employed by many military forces responsible for civilian deaths.
“Every force that kills a lot of civilians uses the same argument,” he said, adding that Jewish civilians historically rejected such justifications when used against them. “I don’t really think these are arguments; they felt more like defense mechanisms, like callousness.”
One of the most charged aspects of Beinart’s argument was his critique of how antisemitism is invoked to shut down conversations about Palestinian rights. He described the use of this accusation to justify oppression as a perversion of Jewish history.
“It is deeply upsetting to see the way in which the language of antisemitism is used to defend a system of human inequality,” he said. “To use antisemitism as a way to silence people struggling for human equality seems to be a terrible kind of inversion of Jewish history.”
Beinart took aim at the claim that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic. He noted that organizations like the Anti-Defamation League define anti-Zionism as antisemitism.
“This definition is junk, it’s worthless,” he said. “It makes no sense as a definition of bigotry.”
He argued that this tactic is not meant to address actual antisemitism but to redirect the conversation.
“The move is always to turn the conversation away from what’s happening on the ground to the allegedly antisemitic motivation for the people who are leveling the criticism," Beinart said.
He noted that Jewish organizations that claim to study antisemitism are often led by individuals with no expertise in the subject. He backed the evidence up, explaining the University of Pennsylvania’s head of an antisemitism task force is a dentist and at UCLA, it’s someone who studies real estate and finance.
“Jewish scholars who study antisemitism won’t fulfill the purpose of these task forces, which is to purposefully create a pretext for censoring and shutting down pro-Palestinian speech," he said.
A core theme of Beinart’s talk was the way in which Palestinians are systematically dehumanized, both in discourse and in practice. He reflected on how, growing up, “Palestinians were also talked about, but never listened to.” He noted that within the dominant Jewish narrative, Palestinians exist only as a collective monster, “not as individual human beings.”
Beinart also spoke about how even Jewish religious traditions reinforce this perspective. He referenced the story of Esther and how Jewish holidays often follow a familiar script: “They tried to kill us, we survived, so let’s eat.”
He observed that Jewish communities often “cut off these stories in our sacred texts at the point that they might help us with the Jewish capacity to be victimizers, as opposed to be victims.”
This erasure of Palestinian humanity, he argued, enables the continued violence against them.
“Israel destroyed all the foundations of life in Gaza,” he said. “The way to make Israeli Jews safe is to make Palestinians safe too.”
Throughout the discussion, Beinart invoked Jewish tradition to challenge the prevailing ideological commitments of the American Jewish community. He warned against the idolatry of the state, arguing that Israel has been elevated beyond moral critique.
“A state is an instrument for the protection of human life and for human flourishing—it has only conditional value, not unconditional value,” he said.
He criticized the notion that Israel has an unconditional right to exist as a Jewish state, while Palestinian rights remain negotiable, saying, "That is idolatry.”
“In Jewish tradition, human beings have the right to exist because all human beings are created in the image of God,” he said. “A state is not inherently holy. There is no external standard against which Israel is judged.”
Ultimately, Beinart’s message was one of moral reckoning. He called for an end to Israel’s impunity, arguing that it is this impunity that has led to the horrors unfolding in Gaza. He urged for “loving but persistent pressure” to hold Israel accountable, insisting that true safety for Israeli Jews is only possible if Palestinians are also safe.
He underscored the urgent need for a political solution that does not privilege one people over another, saying, “we are deeply intertwined, and that our people can only be truly safe if Palestinians are truly safe.”
To conclude, Beinart acknowledged the resistance his arguments face within the Jewish community.
“The people who most want to read my book are those already in my close community,” he said. “Those who most need to read it are the ones least likely to.”
He ended the talk with a call for Notre Dame and the broader Catholic community to harness its tradition of believing in human equality.
“Catholics have brought their best moral tradition of social justice to so many movements in American history. I think they can bring this to this one as well, " he said.
