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With the Gaza ceasefire possibly collapsing any minute, we return to the topic of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and the ensuing war in the Holy Land. Specifically, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic discuss the tension between a belief in universal human rights, on the one hand, and allegiance to one’s ethnic and religious roots, on the other.

Joining Shadi and Damir is friend of Wisdom of Crowds Peter Beinart, opinion writer for the New York Times and editor-at-large of the magazine, Jewish Currents. In recent years, Beinart has emerged as a leading Jewish voice wrestling with the moral questions surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict. His new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, describes the different ways that Jews have wrestled with the morality of the war in Gaza. Peter is an observant Orthodox Jew, and this book documents how his criticism of the war has affected (and even broken) several of his friendships in his community.

Peter affirms a belief in the universality of human rights and obligations to all human beings. But, he confesses, “there’s another voice inside my head: don’t be naive, this is a world of power in which people either look out for their own, or nobody looks out for you.” Is it possible to reconcile these two thoughts?

Shadi argues for the universalist point of view: given the high number of civilian deaths in the Gaza war, shouldn’t it be obvious that our allegiance to universal values should take priority over everything else? Shouldn’t we have more “sensitivity for civilian deaths”? Damir presses from the opposite, particularist perspective. He’s been reading the Bible. There is, Damir says, a biblical sense for “the destiny of the Israelites to the land” of Israel. Moreover, Damir argues, even if Israel is powerful today, and even if Israel did not need to wage war on the scale that it did in Gaza, not too long ago, Israel actually was existentially threatened by its neighbors. Moreover, Iran is still a real threat today.

This is a heart-wrenching, wide-ranging episode that covers several controversial topics: the parallels between the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza; whether Israel can be called an Apartheid state; how to interpret the historical books of the Bible, in particular the Book of Joshua; and much more.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Peter and our hosts discuss why the Israeli Left is dead and why Yair Lapid supports Trump’s Gaza mass expulsion plan; how liberal Americans internalize the ethnic framing of the Israel-Palestine debate; Israel’s right to exist; ethnonationalism on the rise around the world; what Steve Bannon really thinks about American Jews; and how to maintain friends with whom you might have deep disagreements.

Required Reading

* Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Amazon).

* Peter Beinart, The Beinart Notebook (Substack).

* Peter Beinart, “Teshuvah: A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return” (Jewish Currents).

* October 2023 podcast episode with Peter: “Peter Beinart on Israel, Hamas, and Why Nonviolence Failed” (WoC).

* July 2020 podcast episode with Peter: “Arguing the One-State Solution” (WoC).

* “Lapid presents Gaza ‘day after’ plan in DC, urges extended Egyptian takeover” (Times of Israel).

* The Book of Joshua (Bible Hub).

* David Ben-Gurion (Jewish Virtual Library).

* Yeshayahu Leibowitz (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Micah Goodman, Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War (Amazon).

* Amoz Oz, In the Land of Israel (Amazon).

* Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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The Universal and the Particular

Wisdom of Crowds

The Universal and the Particular