‘To block out the screams’ — Peter Beinart on Israel, white South Africa and Gaza

16 Mar 2025

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 no longer enter a synagogue in the knowledge that he is welcome. In the book’s first paragraph, he accepts the consequences of his perceived betrayal; he is aware, he writes, that a “former friend” considers him a “risk” to the safety of his people.

“The breach in our relationship mirrors a broader schism within our tribe,” Beinart notes of this former friend, “between Americans and Israelis, left and right, young and old.”

The rift, of course, has been caused by the events of 7 October. For Beinart’s former friend, the terror of that day remains singular and all-encompassing. But for Beinart himself, who is likewise “shaken by its horror,” the day cannot (indeed, must not) stand isolated and apart.

Not much later in the prologue, Beinart lays down the sentence that is our best reason to keep reading: “This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams.”

Whether we are Jewish or not, the lessons promise to be profound. Soon, we are deep inside the minutiae of Jewish victimhood, beginning with the standard trope of persecution and triumph as told at the seder table during festivals – or, as the old joke goes, “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat!”

Here, in elevating the joke to a chapter heading, Beinart draws our attention to the festival of Purim, which celebrates the trope as it played out in the royal court of ancient Persia. As told in the biblical book of Esther, the story’s concluding twist – after the miraculous foiling of the plot to exterminate all the Jews – was the mass murder, instead, of about 75,000 Persians.

“For most of our history,” writes Beinart, “when Jews had little capacity to impose our will via the sword, the conclusion of the book of Esther was a harmless and even understandable fantasy. Who can blame a tormented people for dreaming of a world turned upside down? But the ending reads differently when Jews wield life-and-death power over millions of Palestinians who lack even a passport. Today, these blood-soaked verses should unsettle us.”

Already, at only 12 pages in, we have come too far to turn around.

Beinart’s trenchant observation is that Purim was never only about the dangers that gentiles pose to Jews; it was equally about the dangers that Jews pose to gentiles. This tradition was partially forgotten, he suggests, with the coming of modernity and the secularisation of the Jewish mainstream. But it was the formation of the state of Israel, he contends, that ensured its tragic and inestimable loss.

“We evade the harsh realities of 1948 just as we evade the end of the book of Esther,” Beinart asserts. “In this way, Israel’s creation is made to fit the script.”

A harsh white vintage

Although he doesn’t make the link explicit, the year 1948 runs like a misshapen spine through Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza – for this was not just the year of Israel’s founding and the Palestinian Nakba; it was also the year of the launch of the apartheid project in South Africa.

For nationalists in both countries, of course, the arrival of the new dispensation heralded the realisation of a universal right: the right to self-determination. But the undeniable problem, as Beinart reminds us, was that one group was invoking this right at the expense of another.

“That’s why the world was unimpressed by the South African defence minister PW Botha’s claim, in 1977, to be defending ‘the right of self-determination of the white nation’,” Beinart notes. “Because he wasn’t defending self-determination. He was defending supremacy. When Jewish leaders say self-determination is a universal right, they’re employing the same sleight of hand.”

Beinart knows, better than anyone, that he is treading on highly flammable ground; the comparison is rejected – sometimes violently so – by the vast majority of his tribe. Still, after acknowledging the objections, he turns his focus to international law, where “there is a word for legal dominance based on ethnicity, religion, or race”.

That word, he notes – after citing Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Israel’s own B’Tselem – is not “self-determination” but “apartheid”.

The text continues for another 25 pages before Beinart alights again on the ghost of white supremacist South Africa. This time, he is venturing into even more flammable territory, in the form of the background and context to the 7 October event.

“While there is a crucial moral difference between Hamas’s purposeful targeting of civilians and attacks by the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa,” he writes, “which were largely restricted to military and industrial sites, the repression of nonviolent tactics encouraged armed resistance there too.”

Beinart is working on multiple levels here: he is repeating, as he does throughout the text, his condemnation of the brutality of the Hamas attack on 7 October; he is doubling down on his personal preference for nonviolent resistance; and he is emphasising, based on the evidence he has already provided, that Palestinian tactics such as “security cooperation, calls to boycott, appeals to international institutions and protest marches” had all been defeated by as late as 2023.

For South Africans of a certain vintage, it was as if we could hear the echo of Nelson Mandela from deep in our own supremacist past: “It was only when all else had failed, when all the channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle.”

This, Beinart concurs, was the appropriate response of Madiba back in 1964. And yet we don’t need the American to tell us that it would be another 30 years – all but three of which the designated “terrorist” would spend in apartheid prisons – until the end of white supremacist rule.

What we do need from Beinart, though, is an interpretation that rejects Jewish exceptionalism; another reading of the script, perhaps, that turns everything on its head.

Again, Beinart doesn’t disappoint. Quoting the poet WH Auden – “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return” – he asserts that many in his tribe claim ignorance of even this basic truth. Because to know, Beinart writes, “would require acknowledging that evil resides not only in our enemies – Haman, Amalek, Hamas – but in us and the state that speaks in our name”.

It all leads seamlessly to the third chapter, titled “Ways of Not Seeing”, where the essential message Beinart seeks to upend is that “the real victims are Jews”.

Methodically and expertly, he dispatches with the supremacist playbook of denial, rationalisation and ubiquity: the argument that the huge Palestinian death toll can be blamed entirely on the use of human shields (denial); the argument that there are no innocents in Gaza because they all voted for Hamas (rationalisation); and the argument that Israel can’t be singled out because “everybody does it” (ubiquity).

“Lurking beneath all these arguments is a deeper one,” Beinart adds: “Israel has no choice. Even many Jews who are pained, even horrified, by Gaza’s suffering, still can’t imagine an alternative. Despite their anguish, they support the war because they believe Israelis will never be safe unless Israel destroys Hamas.”

From the river to the sea

Generally, as South Africans – and assuming that Ernst Roets and The Kiffness are the exceptions that prove the rule – we seem to know how this narrative unfolds. For one thing, we know that the resistance will grow (as in, additional fighters will be recruited) in direct inverse proportion to the brutality of the state. For another, we know that since the outside world can see through the fearmongering and the victim-blaming, the actual perpetrators are in the long run likely to be cast as pariahs.

But, as Beinart points out, what complicates this pattern in Israel’s case is the long and very painful history of the anti-Semitic impulse.

“For establishment Jewish organisations that want to avoid looking closely at what Israel has done in Gaza,” he notes, “accusing Israel’s critics of antisemitism is the single best way to avert one’s eyes.”

During the Gaza war, Beinart explains, no American organisation has “worked harder to depict Palestinians and their supporters as bigots” than the Anti-Defamation League. One of the slogans that the ADL cites most often, he points out, is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which it deems “an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland”.

Israel’s foreign minister, Beinart reminds us, has even equated the slogan to a “call for the genocide of the Jewish people in Israel”.

Here, Beinart has little patience for the grift. What makes the antipathy to the phrase “river to the sea” so ironic, he notes, is that Israel “uses similar expressions, all the time” to describe its own territorial sovereignty. “And while the ADL can speculate about how a Palestinian state from the river to the sea would treat Jews,” he writes, “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians isn’t hypothetical.”

Read more: Israel-Palestine War

Read more: Middle East crisis

The displacement of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; the further displacement of “several hundred thousand more” in 1967, when Israel extended its borders; the fact that most Palestinians under Israeli control lack citizenship, while “none enjoy legal equality”; and the accusation of genocide at the International Court of Justice, “a charge endorsed by some of the most prominent human rights lawyers in the world” – all of these things, Beinart notes, have happened in the real world.

In other words, he contends, between the river and the sea, “Israel has already perpetrated, or is perpetrating”, the very abuses that the ADL and others accuse Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists of wanting to perpetrate.

“It’s a remarkable act of projection,” Beinart declares.

Twenty pages later, as his short book nears its end, the author returns to South Africa, where a similar story of victimhood was once used to justify supremacy.

“Today, this narrative may seem delusional and grotesque,” he writes. “But I spent part of my childhood in apartheid-era Cape Town: trust me, Afrikaners and most other white South Africans believed it with all their heart. And it wasn’t as different from the story Jews often tell ourselves about Israel as we might like to believe. When Jews imagine a state that grants Palestinians equality between the river and the sea, many envisage the supposed barbarism and dysfunction of the Middle East descending upon pristine Tel Aviv. White South Africans, who took an equally dim view of their surroundings, nurtured similar fears.”

Back then, of course, the supposed barbarism was also a projection – or, if not, it was a response that would dissolve once the scales of justice had tipped. “The ‘necklace’ was a brutal response to a brutal system,” writes Beinart. “Once that system disappeared, it did too.”

So what will it look like, he asks, when Jews “lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world”.

It will look, he answers, like “liberation” – not just for the actual victims, but for the perpetrators too.

As Beinart notes in his book’s penultimate paragraph: “When South Africa’s legal team – Black, white, Afrikaner, Muslim, one a protégé of a Jewish judge on her country’s supreme court – charged Israel at the International Court of Justice, it seemed to me that they weren’t only trying to end a genocide. They were trying to pass a torch.” DM

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South Africa

Made to fit the script

A harsh white vintage

From the river to the sea