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zionism
The Shame of What We've Done: Assessing Jews' Responsibility for Israel's Actions
A new book by Peter Beinart analyses how the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel's agency in creating the resistance it faces.
Feb 02, 2025
The dominant self-conception of the Jewish story is innocence, repeated persecutions, and then redemption by creation of the Jewish nationalist State of Israel.
This narrative is critically examined in Peter Beinart's new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.
Beinart's book says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel's agency in creating the resistance it faces: "We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history's permanent virtuous victims."
The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in "diaspora" is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel's actions, on campuses and in the streets worldwide.
Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, is now an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, and a New York Times contributor.
He has been in a 20-year progression of seeing, more and more sharply, the "Jewish and democratic" state of Israel as anti-democratic and incompatible with Jewish tradition.
He writes that support for a Jewish state has become "idolatry," permitting endless killing, torture, and oppression of Palestinians "There is no limit. No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite."
Contemporary Jewish life is filled with that idolatry, he observes: "In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself."
The book attributes the horrors imposed on 2 million human beings in Gaza not only to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but to Jews: "Worshipping a country that elevates Jews over Palestinians 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."
Beinart is not playing the peekaboo game of saying Jews are not responsible for Israel, and the other half of the time saying Israel is the Jewish State.
He's not saying "all Jews," but fairly saying "representative," "mainstream" Jewish organizations worldwide are now Zionist. Anti-Zionist organizations are dissident.
He observes that many synagogues have an Israeli flag on the bima (platform where the Torah is read) "and a prayer for Israel in the liturgy."
It was predicted and warned about, as the Zionist movement grew, that the effect of creating a Jewish nation-state would be Jews being seen in the light of that state's actions.
The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in "diaspora" is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel's actions, on campuses and in the streets worldwide.
Beinart places the Hamas violence of October 7, 2023 in context, as consistent with the history of suppressed peoples without peaceful means to contest their status, as is seen in slave revolts and anticolonial guerilla wars.
I note that Beinart's thoughts are resonant with what, almost 100 years ago, historian and then-Zionist Hans Kohn wrote of 1929 anti-Jewish riots after 12 years of Zionist colonization in Palestine under British authority:
We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August… They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt… We have been in Palestine for 12 years [since the Balfour Declaration] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the Indigenous people.
Israeli retribution since October 7, 2023 on the 2 million-plus population of Gaza and their means of life—homes, utilities, schools, universities, hospitals—has officially resulted in over 46,000 deaths and innumerable injuries directly from IDF attacks.
The medical journal Lancetestimates deaths as likely much higher, counting "deaths from starvation, disease, or cold."
Most of the population of Gaza was made homeless, huddled in improvised shelters, pushed by IDF warnings from one "safe zone" to another, often then bombed.
Beinart's book is an analysis of Zionist apologetics that are necessary to both regard oneself as moral and defend what Israel has done, from the 1947-49 Nakba—terroristic expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their communities within present-day Israel—to Gaza in 2025.
He denounces dehumanizing, demonizing, Zionist lies about Palestinian resistance: "These claims don't withstand even modest scrutiny. They're less arguments than talismans. They ward off dangerous emotions like grief and shame."
Using the model of the dismantling of apartheid South Africa, he tries to envision what principles could heal Palestine :
The details matter, but they matter less than the underlying principles. Wherever they live together, Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law. And they should work to repair the injustices of the past. The Israelis who were made refugees on October 7 should be allowed to go home. And the Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home. Historical wrongs can never be fully undone. But the more sincere the effort, the greater the reconciliation that ensues.
This would be a radical reconception of Jewish life in Palestine, that in abandoning the role of conquerors, Jews may live as Jewish Palestinians. He makes the point that whites relinquishing apartheid was a more peaceful process for South Africa than having it overthrown.
In the summary chapter of the book, Beinart says Israel's conduct is from a heretical Jewish tendency to believe Jewish people are sacred, rather than people with extra obligations: "So what if a few dreamers in Moorish Spain or the Silesian shtetl [Eastern European Jewish village] consoled themselves with the idea that deep within us lies a special spark of the divine? They didn't have the power to do anything about it."
This self-deification, first proposed by an Israelite named Korach, who challenged Moses' leadership, hadn't mattered as much until the creation of "Jewish" national power: "All that changed with the creation of Israel. Only once Jews control a state with life-and-death power over millions of non-Jews does Korach's claim of intrinsic Jewish sanctity become truly dangerous."
Beinart calls for liberation for Jews from the Zionist doctrine that Jews are only victims, never victimizers: "We can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world… We can lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world."
More than level of observance or denomination, the question of Zionism is going to be a fault line in Jewish fellowship, Beinart believes:
Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it's not clear what is left. But the benefit of recognizing that Jews are not fundamentally different from other people is that it allows us to learn from their experience. Jewish exceptionalism is less exceptional than we think. We are not the only people to use a story of victimhood to justify supremacy.
Israel's perpetual peril is the Arab population it has displaced but not exterminated. They are determined to redeem their birthright to live as freely in Palestine as Jews do.
Instead of conquest, Beinart proposes a model of restraint, cooperation, and respect—along a line of Jewish thinkers from Ahad Ha'am to Judah Magnes to Albert Einstein.
Many of the visions for Jewish settlement in Palestine were universalist and pacific.
In 1927, Zionist writer (and Chaim Weizmann protege) Maurice Samuel mused, in his book I, The Jew, that Jewish civilization "for 60 generations" demonstrated "that neither conquest or oppression was necessary to its survival… a group can survive without mass murder."
Whether trauma or hubris allows Zionists in Israel and elsewhere to trust that model—finding the image of God even in their "enemies"—is the question.
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Moving From Colonial to Liberation Medicine in a Time of Genocide
This transformative work requires reimagining medicine’s structures, moving people with racist beliefs out of positions of power, and creating systems for the most marginalized to lead.
Jan 26, 2025
Ignoring a genocide or pretending it is not happening is not a "difference of opinion." It is a racist ideology. This ideology does not belong in medicine. Decolonizing medicine requires understanding that we will not have health equity as long as racism is baked into the very structures of medicine. Decolonizing medicine is not about tweaking who is at the top of the pecking order or playing into liberal identitarianism, which, as Dr. King accurately diagnosed, “is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” Decolonizing medicine requires reimagining the order altogether, because the one that exists was created in a time of subjugating women, queer, Indigenous, chronically ill, Black/brown, immigrant and other people deemed “deplorables” by European colonial standards.
The "Other" in medicine—whether between doctor and patient or doctor and structure—this phenomenon is about power, who has it and who is denied it. Power differentials create health inequities, and the differences that exist today were established in a time of colonial conquest. The United States and all of the Global South were colonized by militaries, missionaries, and medics. If we want health equity, we have to transform these outdated and harmful structures of power. We must compost them and create the conditions for something more healing to grow.
To do that we must understand the history and context of how these power structures evolved, who is occupying the seats of power today, and why. People in power in medicine today will tell you that we do not want to mix politics in medicine. But medicine is politics practiced on the human body. To pretend it is any other way is to ignore the actual realities that are causing harm on marginalized people in a system that was not built to serve us. Those in power prefer to distract us with superficial adjustments rather than structural ones. They tell us we are “unprofessional” when we push for change that will close the gaps on disparities. We can no longer play their game of delay.
Yesterday, my colleague Dr. Yipeng Ge suggested we change our oath, from the Hippocratic oath to an oath crafted by the doctors in Gaza, one that uplifts that level of commitment to serve the people.
History and context are critical to understand so we can stop having people who kill and justify killing inside medicine. Having a genocidal war criminal for a physician is bad for patient outcomes. We do not have to study it. We can just look at physician Howard Maibach, a devout Zionist who injected 2,600 imprisoned people (Black/brown) with pathogens and poisons without their informed consent, reminiscent of the Nazi medical experiments. Before I was slated to speak at the American Medical Association’s first Grand Rounds for Health Equity where we discussed Maibach’s medical racialized violence, Maibach’s lawyer—also “Israel’s lawyer”—Alan Dershowitz pressured my university to prevent me from talking. Dershowitz is now representing Israel in the International Criminal Court hearings calling for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.
Now while Maibach is not a war criminal, he harbors deep-seated racist ideologies. The harm he did and the fact that he remains employed by the University of California reveal the university’s power structure. Maibach’s family donates heavily to the Friends of the IDF, providing material support for the genocide in Gaza. This is a problem. We need doctors who are fully committed to healing and health for all, not killing some because it happens to be in alignment with their political agendas. And we require doctors who allow for discourse, not silencing because “it’s complicated” when people of European ancestry decide it is time to kill again for colonial conquest.
To decolonize medicine is to remove those obstructions to our voices so we can advocate for the health for all, as it is our moral and professional obligation. Since October 2023, medical students from around the country have texted me horrific, violent, and even murderous things that pro-Israeli professors have said about Palestinian patients in their presence. Once these students find their courage to speak up, the world is not ready for what they have to share. This is why there is such active repression of medical students and their voices, as Israeli doctors called for the destruction of the entire healthcare system in Gaza and the powers that be in Western medical institutions repress those of us who do speak up. The silence of healthcare workers across the West is a part of Israel’s genocide, and a recent submission to the United Nations documents exactly how.
In spite of the forces against us, I hope medical students will find their courage and recognize that building a medicine that will serve all will require that courage in order to compost a colonial system. This work requires the daylight of truth. In that daylight, there are incredible doctors ready to build a liberation medicine, one that will be able to address the needs of all the people we serve, not just an elite few—everyone.
I am grateful to medical students like Umaymah Mohammad, whose courage shines as she shares her horror that a professor at Emory went to serve a combat unit during the genocide and came back as if everything was perfectly normal. It is not. Genocide is the most intense expression of racism. Dr. Josh Winer at Emory University is not fit for teaching medical students in a pluralistic society, especially not ones whose family is currently being annihilated by Israel. Umaymah was suspended for speaking up about this violation of her safety and civil rights. Her stance is a moral one—and a missing one—in a colonial medical system that supports genocidal physicians and silences ones who speak up to stop a genocide. The agenda could not be clearer. Please support Umaymah here.
Physicians and other healthcare workers who have been repressed in the West are finding each other, and we are working to teach our colleagues how to cultivate their courage to embark on this transformative work together. We recently held a webinar to launch our peer to peer curriculum—Cultivating Courage—which is a six-week course to learn and unlearn together as we map out what is needed to build a liberation medicine.
As people across the West wake up and realize that physicians who supported, endorsed, and even participated in genocide continue on in their careers as those who stood to make noise about a genocide were defamed, suspended, and even fired, they will start to ask themselves questions about their personal safety in the hospital. Physicians who are deeply racist provide poor care to the people they hate. This has been shown over and over again. And the issue is not simply a healthcare issue. It is a matter of civil rights.
People of color have the right to be served by physicians who do not hate them. Arabs and Palestinians have a right to be served by physicians who do not want to see them annihilated. In a pluralistic society, holding deeply racist beliefs should be enough to show that a person does not have the basic competency required to be a physician. Changing one’s belief is not simply a matter of showing up for a DEI workshop or implicit bias training. This work cannot be led by liberals who opened the door to the right-wing exploitation of civil rights laws to silence people of color across the Global North as the West started its bloody campaign in Gaza. This transformative work requires reimagining medicine’s structures, moving people with racist beliefs out of positions of power. It requires creating systems for the most marginalized people who uplift the health of all in practice, not just in speech, to lead.
The decolonization of medicine is happening right now, led by the doctors in Gaza. With moral courage and leverage, they “absorb what is useful” from Western medicine and “discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own,” in the words of martial artist Bruce Lee. That is the path ahead for physicians of conscience. It is the future of medicine. Yesterday, my colleague Dr. Yipeng Ge suggested we change our oath, from the Hippocratic oath to an oath crafted by the doctors in Gaza, one that uplifts that level of commitment to serve the people. Because in the times that are upon us—social upheaval and climate collapse, fascism and food systems deterioration—we will need a different kind of physician and a different kind of medical system. The time to start laying those seeds is now.
This piece was originally published on Marya’s Substack Deep Medicine.
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Zionist Fragility
The time is long overdue for liberal Zionists to find the courage to take a long hard look at their uncritical support for the actions of the Israeli state as it becomes increasingly indefensible.
Jan 13, 2025
Palestine solidarity activists, students, and scholars are facing an astronomic rise in attacks for calling attention to Israeli policies in the occupied territories, for naming the assault on Gaza a genocide, even for mentioning the health impacts of the massive bombing and killing campaign and calling for a ceasefire. Project Esther—a right-wing task force from the Trumpian Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and designed to crush the pro-Palestine movement—is about to make the repression much worse.
This creates a problem for liberal Zionists in the U.S., deeply allied with Israel but worried about the rightward political swing and distressed by the carnage in Gaza, violence of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and the widening of Israeli attacks in the region. These progressive folks get all tangled up when words like “war crimes” and “genocide,” as well as ending military funding to Israel or support for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, get mentioned in the very next sentence. Repeatedly, liberal Zionists respond to this reality with very illiberal behavior, pulling financial donations from universities and organizations, resigning from groups and institutions they otherwise support, condemning friends, children, and grandchildren for engaging in protests, encampments, and other unruly behavior, complaining that spaces are now “unsafe” for Jews, that “antisemitism” is rampant on college campuses.
Historically, the price of Israel’s settler colonial origins is the hostility of the people who lost their land, homes, and lives towards the people who promulgated this catastrophe. Moshe Dayan, one of the founding Israeli generals, famously stated “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” The strategies of tolerance, negotiation, compromise, humility, respect for international law and human rights, were never woven into the Israeli psyche.
It is possible to be horrified by the suffering of those killed, harmed, kidnapped on October 7 or fleeing to bomb shelters as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian drones and missiles are fired over Israel, and at the same time, to call the brutal, unrelenting assault on Gaza a genocide. There are increasing reports in mainstream media as well human rights organizations from the United Nations to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, to B’Tselem. They document Israeli violations of multiple international laws about the rules of war, violations of the protected status of health care institutions and health care workers, massive civilian injuries and casualties, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, educational facilities, sanitation, water, and agriculture.
At the same time, Israeli allegations promote the idea that Palestinians are savage, hypersexualized animals, capable of horrific acts of violence, and thus, deserving of slaughter. This tactic was common in the Jim Crow south with the descriptions of Black men attacked and lynched. The language is also mirrored in Trump’s depictions of undocumented people coming into the United States. The foundational racism is obvious. The double standard exists because of societal assumptions about who are the “good guys” and who are the “bad,” which men are inherently decent and which men are capable of egregious violent behavior. If Gazans are all “animals,” “terrorists,” “Jew-haters,” then it is much easier to kill them with a clear conscience.
Exceptionalizing Jewish trauma only leads to a complete disregard for international law, proportionality in war, and the degradation of the Israeli military’s claim to be “moral,” to have any respect for the modern rules of warfare, the protected status of hospitals, the dignity of every human being, the safeguarded status of civilians.
When liberal Zionists object to the use of the word “genocide” as “too political,” it reflects their inability to grapple with the historical and current truths about the Israeli government and military and their demonization of Palestinians as less than human. When folks attack people for advocating for a ceasefire, (which is the first step towards ending the assault and protecting what is left of Gaza and releasing hostages), they often charge them with “antisemitism.” This is a descent into a tribal abyss that cannot see the “enemy” as human; cannot imagine the day after when the war ends and over two million hungry, sick Gazans are faced with unimaginable trauma and vast needs to survive and remake their lives; cannot remember that the only time a significant number of hostages were released alive was during a ceasefire.
The time is long overdue for liberal Zionists to find the courage to take a long hard look at their uncritical support for the actions of the Israeli state as it becomes increasingly indefensible and destabilizing, a pariah state that has lost its claim to be a so-called democracy (however flawed) that is endangering Jews in the country and abroad as well as Palestinians everywhere.
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