Peter Beinart knows the importance of admitting when you’re wrong. A professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York, a New York Times columnist, and Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents, he has spent the last three decades as a leading liberal voice in the United States. But, unlike other pundits who pin their flags to the mast in order to pay the bills, Beinart’s writing is characterised by subtlety, self-reflection, and a remarkable political transformation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025). In this slim volume, Beinart, a once outspoken advocate for Israel, makes an incisive intervention into the debate within his own community as to how to respond to the violence that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have unleashed on Gaza. To Beinart’s mind, the killing of more than 70,000 Palestinians by the IDF necessitates deep reflection as to how “Jewish texts, history, and language” have been appropriated to justify “genocide and apartheid” in Palestine.

“The argument of the book”, he tells me over the phone, “is that there are a series of interlocking stories about what it means to be Jewish that are very powerful in many Jewish communities around the world – particularly the United States – which situate Jews as the world’s permanent, righteous victim; and also centre the relationship with the state of Israel as the ultimate test of Jewish loyalty and identity”. Beinart, who observes Modern Orthodox Judaism, argues that such narratives overlook the clear warnings within Jewish texts about how his people, as no different from any other, have a capacity to do harm. 

He gives the example of how the Purim story, which is typically celebrated as the heroic survival of Jewish people in ancient Persia from a plot to exterminate them, ends with the roles reversed and the would-be killers slaughtered. The issue, Beinart tells me, is that ignorance of these theological portents creates a notion that it is impossible for Jewish people to be the perpetrators of oppression. This belief prevents supporters of Israel, whatever their faith or ethnicity, “from reckoning with some very, very painful proof about what Israel has done to the Palestinians”. 

Beinart has lived a life that makes him uniquely attuned to these warnings. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his parents were Jewish immigrants from Apartheid South Africa, a state whose system of racial oppression Beinart likens to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. He completed his undergraduate studies at Yale, before coming to the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to undertake an MPhil in International Relations. 

When I ask Beinart about his time in Oxford, he hesitates for a moment. He begins to list the positives: the friendships he made, the merits of the tutorial system, the freedom to procrastinate making career decisions for two years. But, after some reassurance that he’s not obliged to say nice things about the University, he speaks more candidly: “Oxford was never a place where I felt as comfortable as I did at Yale in the US. There were ways in which its particular version of Englishness was hard to penetrate for me as an American, maybe as a Jewish American.”

Yale in the early 1990s, he describes, “was an institution where public expressions of Jewish identity were very normal and routine”. Oxford, in contrast, felt different: “There was more of a sense that identity questions were private affairs and that in public you didn’t need to be waving those flags.” He clarifies that he doesn’t think it was antisemitism he was experiencing, citing instead the differing cultural attitudes towards religion on either side of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, during his time at the University he always felt somewhat “an outsider”. 

Beinart returned to the United States after graduating from Oxford, beginning as a managing editor at The New Republic magazine. When I ask him how he settled on journalism for a career, he tells me that he left education because he didn’t think he had “the patient temperament to be a good academic”. “I think I’ve always been a bit more dilettantish in the sense that I like to read and engage in academic ideas, but I think that I’m better at translating those ideas for a broad audience than actually producing those ideas by doing the first-hand scholarship.”

Beinart quickly emerged as a stand-out talent, becoming editor of The New Republic in 1999 at only 28 years old, a post he would hold until 2006. It was during his editorship that the magazine supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Whilst an editorial the following year expressed “regret” that the “rationale for war” had “collapsed”, Beinart continued to advocate for American interventionism in his first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. 

By the time he published his second in 2010, however, Beinart’s views had changed dramatically. The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris was his attempt to reckon with how he had got his stance on Iraq so wrong, and demonstrated his new conviction to oppose US military adventurism. He also began to rethink his opinions on Israel, writing in 2012 The Crisis of Zionism, in which he called for an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Eight years later, he went further, penning a piece in the progressive Jewish Currents magazine in which he declared that the “two state solution is dead” and called for a single state where Israelis and Palestinians would be equal citizens – a clear rejection of the main tenets of Zionism.

I ask whether his earlier reckoning with his support for the war on terror helped stimulate his reassessment of Zionism. He entertains this idea: “I think I’ve in tandem had to reconsider the ways in which I bought into mythologies about an American exceptionalism, and a Jewish exceptionalism, which I think led me to overlook the harsh realities about the role America has played in the world – and also the way in which Israel was created and the way in which it sustains itself.”

But, Beinart clarifies, the real driving force behind his shift in thinking was his personal interactions with Palestinians. “I think going to the West Bank for the first time roughly 25 years ago was the beginning of a transformation.” Beinart says that encountering the realities of occupation and the humanity of Palestinians in the face of it unravelled the narratives about Israel that he had been raised on, like “peeling away an onion”. 

In Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, he recalls one particularly pivotal moment. Walking through a market in the West Bank city of Hebron, he and his 12-year-old son were briefly left alone by their Palestinian companion. Instinctively, Beinart started to fear for their safety, only for their friend to reappear with a Bar Mitzvah present for Beinart’s son. Beinart writes of that day that the true gift their friend gave his son “was helping a young Jew grow up without racism”. He tells me that only through “engaging with Palestinians, listening to Palestinians” can we begin “to chip away at the dehumanisation… which is pervasive in the West”.

For Beinart, such experiences led to a “growing sense that the position I was arguing for – a Jewish state and a Palestinian state alongside one another – was becoming more and more hollow, less connected to reality”. But it also exposed what he sees as fundamental flaws in the “two-state paradigm”. He argues that a two-state solution “can’t really reckon” with the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland and “it can’t really reckon with the desire of Palestinian citizens of Israel to be treated as equal citizens”. 

The solution, then, has to be one state between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea in which all are equal citizens, and which power is shared within a democratic system. To Beinart, this would benefit Palestinians and Israelis alike: “When you have two populations living alongside one another their safety is intertwined. And so a system of violent oppression of one group is not actually the best guarantee of safety for the other group, because that system ultimately produces violence that endangers everybody.” What is required is a “system of representation where people of different backgrounds all have a nonviolent mechanism of having the state answer their concerns. A process of politics, anchored in equality under the law, while it can be messy and dysfunctional, is actually much safer for everybody”. 

So, what is the likelihood of this goal being realised? On the one hand, Beinart observes that, when it comes to Israel, in many Western states “there’s been a massive change in public opinion” in the last three years. He attributes much of this to social media, “which has allowed Palestinians and their supporters a voice that they have not traditionally had because they were largely locked out of the mainstream media… It’s given them what Edward Said famously called ‘permission to narrate’”. 

Beinart also points out that, for liberal supporters of Israel, particularly in America, “Israel has to justify itself in liberal terms as a liberal-democratic project – the Netanyahu era has just made that much, much harder. It used to be that people would claim that Israel wanted to create a Palestinian state but the Palestinians wouldn’t accept one. Netanyahu basically destroyed that line of argument. The effort to translate Israel’s frankly very racist political debate into a more palatable American debate has become almost impossible after more than ten years of Netanyahu – and the magnitude of what Israel has done in Gaza and the magnitude of what Israel is doing in the West Bank”.

But Beinart is under no illusions about just how far off an end to occupation and the creation of a just peace are. Whilst public opinion might be shifting, he points out that the policies of Western states towards Israel, by and large, are not. Within Israel itself, Beinart tells me, very little reflection about the immeasurable suffering the state has inflicted on Palestinians has occurred. While there are fierce debates about the personality of Benjamin Netenhayu, about the role of religion in the state, and about what kind of country Israel should be for Israelis, “there’s not really that much of a debate about how Israel should treat Palestinians, or the debate is within a very narrow framework.

“No one is really operating from the principle that Palestinians have a right to be free, and almost nobody is really saying that there should be a sovereign Palestinian state. Even if Netanyahu is defeated, I don’t think you’re going to see anything more than a cosmetic shift.”

So what can be done to bring about change? “We have to end the complicity of Western countries with Israel”, Beinart argues. He identifies ending the supply of weapons from the United States and the EU’s trade agreement with Israel as the top priorities. “It wouldn’t make sense to expect anything to change absent of that because, in supremacist political systems, whether it’s the United States under Jim Crow, [Apartheid] South Africa, or Northern Ireland, people who benefit from these supremacist systems, their plan A will always be to continue them. They are only willing to think of a plan B or C or D when the resistance, internal and external, becomes so strong that the system starts to break down, that it no longer works for them. 

“Until we have this kind of resistance – which I hope is nonviolent, ethical in nature, and offers a vision of mutual liberation – I don’t think you’re going to see powerful forces in Israel be willing to seriously consider an alternative to supremacist politics.”

And, more locally, what can Oxford students do? He says that students should “find a balance between different kinds of virtues”. The first is curiosity about the rationale behind opposing views. He says that students should ask: ‘What life experiences have led you to these views?’ “That’s a question that unfortunately people very rarely ask of Palestinians, but I think that’s also a question that pro-Palestine activists sometimes don’t ask enough of Jews who support Israel – ‘What’s the family experience that you had that made you so convinced that a Jewish state is necessary for safety?’ Those stories might not convince you that those views are right but they give you a greater degree of empathy for where people are coming from.”

The second, however, is a steadfastness in standing up for your beliefs. Beinart describes opposing Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its statewide discrimination against Palestinians as “one of the great moral challenges of our time” and insists that “people should try to rise to that challenge by fighting for justice. It’s important, at a certain point, to be able to say clearly that there are grave injustices taking place and to speak out against them”. For Beinart, empathy and an unequivocal commitment to justice can, and must, go together.

Beinart’s principled, high-profile stance on Palestine has placed him in the firing line of scathing criticism, the most vociferous of which accuses him of “abandoning” his own community. When asked about this, he is remarkably unfazed: “You know, I’ve been doing this for long enough that angry responses and condemnations… don’t particularly bother me.” But he is also candid about the personal cost, admitting that he has lost “some relationships that were very important to me. I feel a sense of sadness, because some of those were relationships that were very important to my kids”. Nonetheless, he will not indulge in self-pity: “A whole new set of relationships have opened up that are also very precious to me in a different way with people with whom I share an ethical perspective. So there’s loss, but also gain.”

Beinart’s faith is what sustains him through all of this. In a life defined by evolution, it has been his one constant; the anchor keeping him tethered through personal and political sea-changes. Speaking with him, it is also clear that it underpins his progressive politics. But Beinart has the prescience to avoid making the same mistake as those he criticises in Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: he refuses to argue that being an observant Jew compels one to subscribe to a specific political ideology. “I think it would be very silly to say that the essence of Judaism is progressive or liberal or anything like that. It’s a tradition that is ancient and vast and speaks in many, many different voices, just as Christianity and Islam do.

“I have to be honest in saying that I take within Judaism certain traditions, and those are the ones that are more powerful to me.” He recognises that, just as “in the 19th century there were devout Christian slave holders and devout Christian abolitionists”, Jewish people can hold diametrically opposing views, without one being a truer believer than the other. Judaism is complex and pluralistic, he tells me, pointing out that extremist Israeli ministers such as Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich “read the same texts, they also get up and put tefillin on in the morning like I do, but they emphasise different strains”. 

As for his interpretation of Judaism, it epitomises the outlook of the present-day Peter Beinart; a man whose commitment to equality supersedes everything else. “To me, my starting point, my meta-principle, is that the Torah begins with universal human beings who are of no ethnicity, religion, race, or nation, who are created equal in the image of God. Everything flows from there.”