Peter Beinart. Photo: Joe Mabel via Wikimedia Commons.

In April 2024, Guardian columnist Naomi Klein said that Zionism is a “project that commits genocide in” the name of the world’s Jews. We argued at the time that this op-ed was one of the most despicable pieces published at the outlet in the 15 years we’ve been monitoring their content.

Last week, they published an essay by Peter Beinart (adapted from his new book) that arguably has the potential to incite even more hatred against Jews than Klein’s screed.

Beinart, a Guardian columnist, is a former “Liberal Zionist” turned anti-Zionist, and now fancies himself one of the few Jewish voices brave enough to speak out about what he claims is the moral corruption at the core of Zionism — which he’s characterized as “supremacism” — and the Jewish community more broadly.

He also largely blamed the Oct. 7th massacre on Israel’s long “denial of Palestinian freedom,” and began describing the IDF’s early response to Hamas’ pogrom, including even the relocation of Palestinian civilians to keep them out of harm’s way, as a “monstrous crime” and another potential “Nakba,” before even the ground invasion began.

He focuses his Guardian essay on the “dark side” of Purim, which he likens with Jewish support for the “slaughter in Gaza.”

What’s the “dark side” of Purim to Beinart?

Writing as if he’s the only Jew who’s ever read the Megillah — and then serving the role of a Jewish informer, “revealing” to non-Jews the sinister truth about this seemingly joyous Jewish festival — Beinart chides the Jewish community for “forgetting” that the book of Esther doesn’t end with Haman’s execution after his plan to annihilate the Jews was thwarted.

Since the genocidal edict couldn’t be annulled, Beinart recounts, Jews were allowed to defend themselves by striking, “slaying and destroying” their “enemies with the sword.”

The Jews, he adds, “killed 75,000 people” and then declared the 14th “a day of feasting and merrymaking.”

He then writes that “with the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry” — before warning, in a sentence that “Purim isn’t only about the danger Gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them.”  [emphasis added]

The Book of Esther, however, couldn’t be clearer that the Jews’ enemies prepared a genocide, and Jews fought back and killed their enemies, preventing the genocide.

Though this is indeed cause for celebration, antisemites through the ages have distorted and weaponized the text, claiming it shows that Jews are vengeful, bloodthirsty, and even genocidal.

Beinart’s agenda here in using rhetoric redolent of the ancient blood libel, about the “blood-soaked massacre” celebrated during Purim, is clear, as he begins pivoting to Israeli sins, and, eventually, to the Gaza war, moralizing that “today, these blood-soaked verses should unsettle us.”

Why should we be “unsettled”?

Beinart answers that by chiding contemporary Jews for a “false innocence” when discussing Israel. He criticizes Israelis and Jews who (correctly!) point out that “the Palestinian refugee issue originated in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.” In Beinart’s telling, the attack by five Arab armies of the nascent Jewish State was justifiable — a war launched to protect the Palestinians from the Jews.

Turning to Gaza, he not only blames “establishment Jewish officials” for promoting what he suggests is a lie — or, at least, a huge exaggeration — that Hamas uses Palestinians civilians as human shields, which vastly increases the number of non-combatants killed, but seems to defend the terror group’s use of human shields, writing that this tactic is “typical of insurgent groups.”

Mocking those who would hold the terror group itself responsible for hiding fighters and weapons in homes, mosques, and hospitals, and using a tunnel system below civilian infrastructure, Beinart wonders what precisely Hamas should do, “put on brightly colored uniforms, walk into an open field, and take on a vastly more powerful conventional army?!”

The answer is painfully obvious to all but the most extreme anti-Zionist ideologues: they shouldn’t have attacked Israel and slaughtered Jews in the first place.

To most Jews, Beinart continues in his complaint, the “human shield” argument is designed “to prove that Israel is always innocent“ — and that the state is never the author of Palestinian suffering. In this, we see the stunning moral obtuseness that informs his discourse on Judaism and Israel.

For anti-Zionist Jews like Beinart, it is Palestinians who are never assigned agency, but, instead, are infantilized, with their deep-seated antisemitic pathos framed as a legitimate grievance.

Whether we’re discussing the Palestinian leadership’s alliance with Hitler, their opposition to the 1947 UN Partition Plan, decades of terrorism, including the Second Intifada, which was launched during the peak of the peace process, or the rejection of several Israeli offers of Palestinian statehood, bad Palestinian decisions are inevitably framed in a way exculpating Palestinians, while imputing an Israeli root cause.

At his core, Beinart refuses to hold Palestinians morally culpable for participating in, supporting, or providing succor to, the death cult whose bloody pogromists murdered, raped, tortured and mutilated Jews with glee — and whose leaders knew full well that the response to their unprovoked attack would bring untold suffering to civilians.

Moreover, no lessons were learned by the pro-Palestinian movement on that dark Shabbat day. Instead of anything resembling self-reflection, most, as Beinart’s reaction in the days and months following the massacre showed, actually doubled down on their beliefs, intensifying their denunciations of Israel.

“Western activists for Palestinians,” Shany Mor wrote, “are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome.” Hamas’s gruesome attack, he concluded, “poses a threat to this worldview, and the only way to resolve it is by heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence. The terrorist atrocities don’t trigger a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out; they lead to an even greater revulsion at the victim.”

Finally, Peter Beinart is not a self-hating Jew.

Rather, he fancies himself a better Jew — in fact, one of the very few genuinely “good Jews.” In his book, Trials of the Diaspora, Anthony Julius calls Jews like Beinart “scourges” — a term which relates to their self-anointed role as prophets, whipping the wayward Jewish people into line. By indicting most Jews, and the Jewish State, he puts himself on the “right” side of the moral divide, proclaiming his own superiority to the ruck of his sinful fellow Jews.

What Beinart now peddles, Haviv Rettig Gur observed, “is an ideologically updated version of the same claim of deep-seated and defining criminality in the Jews” as Theobald of Cambridge, a Jewish convert to Christianity who leveled the first known accusation that Jews ritually murder Christian children. Beinart, a convert to anti-Zionism, confirms “to our tormentors that [Jews’] criminality is the distillation and apotheosis of the great evils of our age.”

The fact The Guardian employed Peter Beinart’s services as a Jewish informer, a modern-day Theobold, should surprise nobody.

Adam Levick serves as co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a different version of this article appeared.