The global acclaim for Peter Beinart’s new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, rests mainly on its call for a Jewish awakening that moves beyond the story of persecution and victimhood. But a thread that runs through the book, too often overlooked, is the trenchant comparison between modern-day Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. For a local audience, such a reading is rich in anti-supremacist nutrients.
Made to fit the script
‘White South Africans were just as afraid of being thrown into the sea as Israeli Jews are now,” writes Peter Beinart in his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. “Perhaps more afraid since they constituted a smaller share of the population and had fewer allies overseas.”
These words, which appear in the book’s final chapter, are as hard won as they are historically necessary – they emerge, in their full comparative context, after more than 100 pages of holding Jewish supremacy to account.
The words also assume, in their appeal to the facts, that readers will agree on the basics: white South Africans were not thrown into the sea; the politics of supremacy and fear will always end in disaster; the dehumanisation of ethnic groups will traumatise everyone concerned, particularly – in the long run – the perpetrators themselves.
And so, at the very beginning of his book, as he prepares to diagnose his tribe’s malaise, Beinart lets us know that he is hurting.
As an observant Jewish journalist based in New York, he tells us, he can…
