Peter Beinart on What It Means to Be Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

SCHEERPOST, May 6, 2026

“American Jews and Jews in general are safer in countries where everybody is treated equally under the law,” Peter Beinart tells TRNN. “The principle of Jewish supremacy, and Christian supremacy, and Hindu supremacy, and Islamic supremacy—all of those things are wrong.”

Marc Steiner TRNN, May 6, 2026

Amid Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza, its illegal annexation of land in the Occupied West Bank, and belligerent warmaking in Iran and Lebanon, antisemitism around the globe is rising—but so is an international chorus of anti-Zionist Jews speaking out against Israel’s crimes. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with renowned author and commentator Peter Beinart about his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and about the “civil war” within the Jewish world over Israel.

…………………………………………………………. Marc Steiner:

I was thinking many ways how to start this, but this is a very difficult time for Palestinians to survive. It’s also a very difficult time for Jews to stand up saying, “Not in our name.” And you are one of the most prominent people out there saying that and not being anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish about it. So talk a bit about that for a minute, just your whole way of approaching what we face.

Peter Beinart:

Well, Judaism is an ancient tradition, which speaks in many, many voices. But for me, when I think about what it means to be a Jew, and I start with the belief that Torah begins with the creation of human beings who are not of any religion or race or ethnicity. The first human beings that we encounter in Torah are not Jews or proto-Jews or Israelites or proto-Israelites. Adam and Eve and Noah, generation of the Tower of Babel, Cain and Abel, they’re universal human beings. And I think the lesson to that for me is that all human beings have incalculable value and that we must never lose sight of the value of all human life. And so what we see in the discourse in Israel and in many Jewish communities around the world is a support for the state of Israel that essentially trumps the value of the lives of all the people who live within that state.

And that seems to me actually something akin to idolatry. It’s essentially the worship of something human made, the creation of a state, and the elevation of it over the lives of the human beings, human beings created in the image of God who live within that state, 50% of whom are Palestinian. And so to me, I think what’s incumbent upon us as Jews is to recenter the value of all human life, including Palestinian life at the center of how we think about what it means to be Jewish……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/06/peter-beinart-on-what-it-means-to-be-jewish-after-the-destruction-of-gaza/