Earlier this week, the Middle East was still trying to come to terms with Donald Trump’s vision of Gaza as a Mediterranean Florida when police in Jerusalem raided and trashed a well-known Palestinian bookstore, the Educational Bookshop, on the implausible grounds that its owners were disturbing the peace. Diplomats from a number of countries crowded into the courtroom for the hearing in a show of solidarity with the arrested men, while customers flocked to the bookshop itself.
Such public support was heartening. Yet the flagrant abuse of police power indicated the government’s sense of impunity: in Israel, these days, compassion is in short supply towards Palestinians.
The question of who deserves compassion, and where it has gone, is the subject of three recent books reviewed here. In Israel, a widespread public indifference towards Arab suffering that was evident long before the existential shock of the Hamas massacres on October 7 2023 was surely a precondition for the collective destruction of Gaza and the extraordinary scale of the Palestinian death toll.
Gideon Levy and David Grossman shed light on this in their books, giving different answers to the question of what really changed on that date. Meanwhile in America, where the Jewish community is increasingly split along generational and other lines, “stand with Israel” nonetheless remains the shrillest cry and the one with the greatest political resonance in Washington.
Meanwhile Peter Beinart questions why supporting Israel seems for so many to rule out acknowledging the scale of Palestinian suffering. The worry that Jewish nationalism may do moral damage to Judaism itself goes back to the very beginnings of Zionism but rarely has it been more of a concern for some Jews than now.
Levy’s book The Killing of Gaza is a selection of reportage by the Haaretz journalist, who has been charting the diminishing prospects for peace in the Middle East for more than 40 years. Moral sentiments rather than events are his principal concern — above all, Israeli obliviousness to Palestinian suffering.
Watching yet another security barrier being built around Gaza back in 2018, Levy writes that it constitutes an effort to blot out “what no one wants to see . . . a huge concentration camp for people there.” On the Israeli side, near where the cement trucks wait in line, he visits a campsite. “Has tables, playground, places to picnic,” a local guide writes about it on Google Maps. “Nice view of the Gaza strip.”
The barrier itself turned out to be ineffectual. A few days after October 7, Levy went to the town of Sderot, close to north-eastern Gaza, which he describes as “the scariest place” he has ever visited; in Kibbutz Be’eri he catches the “smell of death”. He understands the emotional turmoil produced across Israel by a slaughter unprecedented in its history, but he fears what will follow and his prognosis is bleak. The Palestinians in Gaza have “decided they’re willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom. Is there any hope in that? No. Will Israel learn its lessons? No.”
The Killing of Gaza shows how dreams of collective retribution once found only on the Israeli far right have become mainstream, thanks in no small part to a media — with only a few exceptions — that today functions as a nationalistic cheerleader. On Israeli TV, only one side suffers; after Hamas’s barbarous cruelties, anything is permitted.
It is a familiar phenomenon of course. Israel is certainly not the only country to have descended into jingoism in wartime nor to have resorted to mass killings in a moment of existential crisis. But what has happened to the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), whose officers develop a taste for what Levy terms “infantile humiliation” and whose troops take selfies in plundered underwear? To his dismay, Levy cannot find cases of conscientious objection. In the hills of the West Bank, trigger-happy settlers roam “wilder than ever” as they intimidate or drive out villagers whose land they covet.
Levy feels despair for the mindset these actions reveal. What has Israel got out of the war, he asks, besides “joy at Gaza’s calamity”? Hamas has not been crushed. The US aside, Israel is more of a pariah internationally than ever. Is there even any essential difference between the left and right where the occupation is concerned? Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, may be a convenient lightning rod for dissatisfaction but Levy asks if his opponents would have behaved very differently.
The Thinking Heart, a collection of the novelist David Grossman’s essays and speeches, helps illuminate the kind of moral outlook that Levy is questioning. A renowned member of the left, Grossman has criticised the evils wrought by the occupation and has also attacked the Netanyahu government’s plans for judicial reform. Israel, he warns, is an “illusory democracy” that could easily become “an illusion of democracy”.
Worried about the corrosive effect of what Israelis euphemistically call “the situation”, Grossman sees the country living in a “total denial of reality”. Can there really be an “occupying democracy?” he asks. He thus places himself on one side in the bitter struggle among Israeli Jews for the country’s soul, a struggle dividing those who cling to the idea of peace from those who believe only in force, an older secular left against a resurgent right of nationalistic religiosity.
Yet seemingly, October 7 changes everything for Grossman. He writes that under the shock of that day, confronted with the manifest weakness of the state and the army, life suddenly became “more fragile and precarious”. It turns out that “not only is Israel still far from being a home in the full sense of the word, it also does not even know how to be a true fortress”.
Israelis have become conscious, he says, they may not survive “the next war” without outside help. He foresees increased hatred on both sides, and an Israel that is “much more rightwing, militant and racist”. Perhaps the country will be able eventually to enjoy a “complete, definitive, stable existence”; right now, there is the moral bankruptcy of its leadership and the undying enmity of its neighbours.
Grossman may worry what his country is doing — to others and to itself — yet he also sees Israel as victim. He writes that while the occupation is a crime, what Hamas did is a worse crime — a framing of events that turns comparison into exculpation. Grossman has participated in the anti-government demonstrations and calls to bring home the hostages. Yet beyond calling for a ceasefire, these protests have said little explicitly about Palestinian suffering or confronted head-on what has happened in Gaza in the way Levy would like.
Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza is mostly about and addressed to American Jews. Beinart is struck by the modes of mental and rhetorical evasion that allow many of his friends to reconcile their deep emotional attachment to Israel with the growing ethno-nationalism of its rightwing leadership and the violence of its policies.
He tries to understand how what he calls “ways of not seeing” have generated a “permission not to care” — which easily turned into outright criticism of anyone who said they did care about what the Palestinians in Gaza were suffering. Beinart knows from experience that dissent from a “stand with Israel” line can bring hate mail and vitriol. Nonetheless he seeks to persuade his fellow-Jews they need to do more to acknowledge the Palestinian plight.
As he rightly insists, American Jews are a heterogeneous population in terms of outlook and views that cannot be reduced to those of the leading American Jewish organisations (such as the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League) that claim to speak for them. As self-appointed guardians of the faith, such organisations not only advocate for Israel but also try to curb debate by tarring anyone speaking out for Palestinian rights as antisemitic. Charges of antisemitism have thus become one way of not seeing.
This does not, Beinart points out, do very much to make Israel safer but it has unquestionably harmed free speech and helped Jewish concerns to be dragged into America’s increasingly nasty culture wars. “Jews are never responsible for antisemitism,” he writes. “We are however responsible for fighting it wisely. And conflating Israel and Judaism does exactly the opposite.”
As a practising Jew, Beinart sees the destruction in Gaza as a moment of truth for Judaism itself. How long, he asks, can Jews go on viewing themselves as “history’s permanent virtuous victims” when faced with the horrors that “a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world”.
He makes an important case but will people listen? While the Palestinians face the threat of the total erasure of their existence in Gaza, Israel seems set to become harsher, more introverted and more isolated. As Jews worldwide are identified ever more closely with the state of Israel and its deeds, some of them will rejoice but others will mourn the old values and the faith that once was.
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart Knopf $26/£22, 192 pages
The Thinking Heart: On Israel and Palestine by David Grossman Vintage $16/£9.99, 112 pages
The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe by Gideon Levy, translated by David B Green Verso £14.99, 320 pages
Mark Mazower teaches history at Columbia University
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