Peter Beinart on colonialism and Israel

My first big impression of Peter Beinart was that he was a liberal apologist for the Iraq War. Which he was for a while.

He’s improved a lot since then. (1)

In the interview, he explains a portion of his latest book (Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza) in which he talks about how the larger Jewish community has conceived of Israel. And how the State of Israel has worked hard to identify the well-being of the secular entity that the State of Israel is with the Jewish tradition as a whole. It’s an important element in the public dialogue around Israel.

He also talks about Trump strange declaration that the US would assume control of Gaza.

Beinart in another interview talks about the colonial nature of Israel’s and Trump’s policy for Gaza (to the extent Trump has a coherent one at all) really is a 19th-century style colonial project:

[W]hat we are seeing really is — at a macro level, is the question of whether you can do in the 21st century what you could do in the 19th century, which is to basically destroy entire populations of people because you view them as subhuman. Donald Trump views Palestinians as subhuman, and therefore wants to oversee a mass ethnic cleansing, which would be one of the greatest crimes of the century.

And all across Washington, you hear people essentially shrug, where people say, “Maybe it’s impractical.” I don’t care. The question is not whether it’s impractical. The question is whether we should be thinking about how we get Donald Trump in front of the International Criminal Court as a war criminal. This is one of the most monstrous things an American president has said in our time. And the fact that he can be assimilated like this is just testament to the profound dehumanization of Palestinians that suffuses American public discourse. [my enphasis] (2)

Beinart is a current “editor-at-large” of Jewish Currents, a good-quality source that was once closely aligned with the US Communist Party. And, no, I’m not saying Beinart’s a Commie now. (Or maybe he is, I don’t actually know and don’t actually care.) In any case, the main diplomatic support for Israel in its War of Independence were the US and the Soviet Union, and its main source of military supplies was newly-communized Czechoslovakia acting under the direction of the USSR.

Yes, history is weird.

Notes:

(1) From Greenland to Gaza. Beinart Notebook YouTube channel 02/05/2025. <https://youtu.be/IR0JrJ4iWIo?si=s091YNKEY61ar45g> (Accessed: 2025-05-02).

(2) Peter Beinart on “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” & Trump’s Call for Ethnic Cleansing. Democracy Now! 02/06/2025. <https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/6/peter_beinart_being_jewish_gaza_book> (Accessed: 2025-05-02).