Breakthroughs and Breakdowns
Mohammed El-Kurd and Peter Beinart on Resisting Zionist Supremacy
Ussama Makdisi
In 1836, the Indigenous Methodist William Apess delivered a “Eulogy on King Philip.” In it, he pointed out the hypocrisy of white depictions of the allegedly “savage” 17th-century Native sachem Metacomet of the Wampanoag people, known as “King Philip.” Metacomet had led an anticolonial uprising which had been crushed, and his people and culture were devastated, much to the satisfaction of the Puritan cleric Increase Mather. Metacomet’s wife and son were sold into slavery. He himself was killed by a Christian Indian collaborator working with the Puritans. His corpse was then mutilated. His head hung on a spike at the entrance of the town of Plymouth for over two decades.
Apess reminded his audience that “a fire, a canker, [had been] created by the Pilgrims from across the Atlantic, to burn and destroy my poor unfortunate brethren, and it cannot be denied. What, then, shall we do? Shall we cease crying and say it is all wrong, or shall we bury the hatchet and those unjust laws and Plymouth Rock together and become friends? And will the sons of the Pilgrims aid in putting out the fire and destroying the canker that will ruin all that their fathers left behind them to destroy?”
The United States and the vast majority of white settlers and colonists emphatically answered Apess’s question in the negative. They had already begun dispossessing and sending the so-called civilized tribes on the infamous death march out of the southeastern states, known as the Trail of Tears. They waged a rolling war of extermination against Indigenous peoples across the breadth of the American continent.
Two centuries later, a different genocide unfolds against another Indigenous people. While not overtly directed by the United States, Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians is U.S.-backed and -enabled. In the United States, the constant invocation of “Hamas” functions much as the word “savage” did in William Apess’s time: to justify unspeakable acts of cruelty toward allegedly inferior peoples in the allegedly less civilized parts of the world. It provides an alibi against conscience, introspection, critical thinking, and basic morality, at the same time as it underscores a bitter truth: that centuries after the obliteration of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, over two million Palestinians, including over a million children, are being subjected to the most extraordinary depravity in recent history and there is little anyone can do to stop it.
Mahmoud Khalil, after all, still languishes in a jail in Louisiana after plainclothes American shabbiha abducted him from his Columbia University apartment building. A few weeks after his kidnapping, another group of federal agents abducted graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk of Tufts University—bewildered and evidently terrified, she was literally manhandled by several plainclothes agents and deported to a Louisiana jail as well. Several other international students have been targeted and smeared for daring to express empathy with the oppressed Palestinians.
Across the United States, students, staff, and faculty are living during an unprecedented reign of terror instigated by fanatical Zionist organizations such as Betar US and Campus Watch that enthusiastically boast about their ability to doxx and report vulnerable students to U.S. immigration authorities. Most of the actual terror, though, is carried out by U.S. government officials who claim to be fighting “terrorism” and “antisemitism.” The Trump administration exhibits a profoundly hostile view to pluralist “liberal” higher education and abhors any suggestion that the United States of the mid-21st century no longer resembles their mythologized view of Jamestown or the insular Puritan colonies of Massachusetts Bay.
They suggest that one is a “racist” if one teaches the appalling history of American slavery and apartheid for over two centuries, let alone if one actually opposes the doctrine of white supremacy in the manner that Apess did back in 1836. Zionist partisans, for their part, insinuate with outrage that those fighting for equality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews and against apartheid are “antisemitic.” In March 2025, as their international students faced extraordinary threats, Columbia and Harvard committed themselves to upholding the Palestine exception. They enacted an unprecedented purge of expressions of Palestinian solidarity and policed Middle East studies centers and departments to placate Zionist critics.
And therein lies the rub: for the (white) American supremacists, there are too many Brown people who evoke and embody histories and lived experiences that disturb the mythologized “greatness” of America; to the Israeli supremacists, there are too many Palestinians whose Indigenous presence contradicts the Zionist myth of a “land without a people for a people without a land.” A web of overt supremacy entangles Israel with America, making life in America for those of all faiths in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians suddenly far more precarious than it had been, while rendering the lives of Palestinians in historic Palestine increasingly impossible
“A web of overt supremacy entangles Israel with America.”
In a season replete with books on Palestine and the Gaza genocide written by scholars, activists, and journalists, two books, one by a Palestinian and one by a Jewish American of South African origin, expose the inner workings of this web of supremacy. Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal is a heartfelt manifesto against the philo-Zionism of Western liberalism written by a young Palestinian poet, journalist, and activist. The second book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, is by Peter Beinart. Beinart belongs to a long tradition of Jewish critics of Zionism. His own journey took him from being an ardent Zionist to being a well-known liberal critic of Zionism and Israel’s ideology of Jewish supremacy.
El-Kurd emerged to global recognition as a co-founder of the Save Sheikh Jarrah campaign in 2021, during which his sister recorded a shambolic Jacob Fauci, a New York-raised Israeli Jewish settler, brazenly justifying his theft of their East Jerusalem home by saying “if I don’t steal it, someone else is gonna steal it.” Beinart describes himself as a “Jewish loyalist” and, from a perspective of deep empathy, he laments how far too many Jews, and certainly almost all organized American Jewish establishment organizations that advocate for Israel and Zionism, have become complicit in the monumental evil of genocide in Gaza. Beinart’s book is not written defiantly, in the manner of El-Kurd’s, but with a deep sense of shame at what has transpired in the name of the security of the Jewish people—the horror of Israel’s annihilation of humanity in Gaza, its massacres of children, and its deliberate mass starvation of millions of people, all of which is happening as the Israeli state allows pogroms by fanatical Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. El-Kurd writes to a Western public that has demonized Palestinians; Beinart, from a position of vastly greater privilege, writes to his fellow American Jews, who he suggests have idolized the State of Israel.
El-Kurd’s title Perfect Victims encapsulates how Palestinians have been collectively depicted as “savages” when they do not conform to the Western liberal politics of respectability. Thus, he notes how the occasional (and now long since suppressed) Western mainstream contrition about the tragic deaths (invariably described in the passive voice) of too many innocent “women and children” is predicated on a simultaneous Western demonization of the figure of the Palestinian male—any male—who can be killed at will but will never be mourned. El-Kurd understands precisely how this discourse invisibilizes the systematic Israeli colonial violence that precedes and inevitably produces its anticolonial Palestinian resistance antithesis. “This misplaced focus,” El-Kurd writes, “insinuates that the oppressed must earn what they are already entitled to: liberty, dignity, and basic rights. Otherwise, if the native is not ‘respectable,’ slavery and subjugation would be necessarily applicable, rather than morally reprehensible.” Why is it, asks El-Kurd, that the burden of respectability is so often placed on the victims of colonial violence, rather than on the perpetrators of this colonialism?
The answer to this fundamental question is one that El-Kurd alludes to across the pages of his polemic. It lies, in fact, in a much longer history of the eradication and demonization of virtually all forms of non-Western resistance to Western settler colonialism: whether by Indigenous peoples in the Americas or those in Africa, Asia, Australia, or New Zealand. The illusion of respectability comes later, for it is only when the native threat is utterly subdued and when the anticolonial possibility has vanished as an actual threat to settler sovereignty that space is opened up for the possibility of domesticating, remembering, and even celebrating aspects of native culture and even some sufficiently loyal Indigenous or Black figures—all on what the brilliant Black poet June Jordan describes as the whiteman’s terms.
Liberal Western mainstream culture has never understood, let alone embraced, the idea of defiant militant anticolonial resistance in the moment of its expression, but does so only long after such resistance has become a distant memory, a ghost of “settled history.” C. L. R. James’s famous The Black Jacobins was written in 1938, nearly a century and a half after the Haitian Revolution, and was not considered palatable for mainstream liberal academia until much later. Likewise, Nat Turner’s bloody revolt received an empathetic hearing in certain circles of liberal America only a century and a half after his failed uprising. So, too, Palestinian resistance, with all its failings and contradictions, might one day receive a slightly more impartial hearing and might be finally understood in relation to the monstrous violence of colonialism that has produced and provoked it. But we are a long way off from that moment. Palestinians apparently must first die. They must be utterly defeated and dispersed and subdued, like many other resisting colonized populations in the world, before there is any hope that the liberal Western world will relate to them with empathy or view them as anything other than “savages” and “barbarians” who deserve all that they get. ElKurd senses this when he writes at the beginning of his book that “the vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh.”
The Palestinians, though, have the added burden of not only being represented as “barbaric” but also as “antisemitic,” because their Israeli oppressors speak and act on behalf of the “Jewish state” established after the Holocaust. This state insists that it represents the Jewish people worldwide. Perhaps the most incisive part of El-Kurd’s slim volume is this trenchant observation in the chapter “Tropes and Drones”: whereas Palestinians and their allies feel compelled to insist on the distinction between the anti-Palestinian ideology of Zionism and the religion of Judaism lest they be tarnished with the charge of antisemitism, Zionists and the Israeli state consistently conflate the two. El-Kurd explains his view of this distinction:
Here is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives, by force, in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by “divine decree,” in the name of the Jewish people. Many others reside, by force, on Palestinian land and in Palestinian houses, while their actual owners languish in refugee camps. It is not my fault they are Jewish. I have zero interest in apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression [. . .] I am tired of the impulse to preemptively distance myself from something of which I am not guilty, and particularly tired of the constant burden to prove that I am not inherently bigoted. I’m tired of the pearl-clutching pretense that should such animosity exist, its existence would be inexplicable and rootless, of the academics and intellectuals punching down on the unfiltered among us. Most of all, I am tired of the false equivalence between semantic “violence” and real violence: only one party in this “conflict” is engaged in the intentional and systematic attempted eradication of an entire population.
The power of this passage lies in its directness—or, as El-Kurd puts it elsewhere in his book, in his refusal “to live any more of [his] life in cross-examination.” It also lays bare how many Palestinians see how their contemporary history, stories, and lived experiences are constantly discounted and dismissed as less important than those of Israeli Jews no matter how much evidence of oppression they produce or how deep their attachment to their own land. More to the point, Palestinians understand how the ostentatious Western embrace of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust is predicated on Palestinian dispossession.
El-Kurd asks why is it incumbent upon the Palestinian victims of the self-proclaimed “Jewish state”—which embraces Jewish domination over millions of Muslim and Christian Palestinians whose lands it covets and is backed, defended, and ideologically supported by major Jewish organizations worldwide—to constantly apologize for the fact that some Palestinians occasionally use the word “Jewish” to describe their oppressors? He deplores how the liberal politics of respectability constantly affirms, even when it might timidly criticize specific moments of Israeli criminality, its conviction that Jewish life and history has intrinsically more value than Palestinian life and history. Such a conviction is at the heart of the opposition of virtually every major Western state to South Africa’s urgent application to the International Court of Justice to force Israel to end its crime of genocide in Gaza.
But for the politics of respectability to work, it needs native supplicants. El-Kurd reserves harsh criticism for those he describes, vaguely, as “upwardly mobile Palestinians.” His point, of course, is to expose Palestinians and Arabs who play the liberal politics of respectability, including academics, and who feel that it is better to conform than to challenge power. To be sure, there are many Palestinians—upwardly mobile or not—who refuse to engage in politics; who are afraid; and who understand the power dynamic that El-Kurd discusses and prefer silence, let alone complicity in the liberal language of appeal that inherently demonizes Palestinian resistance and denies major actors and movements in Palestinian history and politics any serious consideration. There are other academics who follow the latest trends in an attempt to climb up one of the few remaining ladders of liberal academia. But such rebukes allow, at times, strident indignation to get the better of wisdom.
El-Kurd does not fully grapple with the fact that a century of Palestinian and Arab writers, scholars, and academics have criticized the politics of representation, the most famous of whom is Edward Said, whom El-Kurd acknowledges, though, in truth, this lineage of intellectual dissent goes all the way back to George Antonius in 1938 and, in fact, even earlier, to the 19th century. Any Palestinian who writes and publishes in English within a Western print world is confronted by what poet Fady Joudah calls “Palestine in English”: we, and this includes El-Kurd, struggle to locate ourselves in overlapping anticolonial voyages in (to borrow from Said’s famous metaphor from Culture and Imperialism). Despite anti-Palestinian racism, we constantly find ourselves writing, appealing, contesting, and arguing all the same. It is an often demoralizing state of being, but it is one that has also led in part to the very phenomenon evident in the West today: over time, and because of the passage of time, the Palestine exception is breaking down. It is no longer an indication of a liberal hegemony that confidently excluded the Palestinians from discussions of the universal, but an expression of the contemporary weakness of the narrative of liberal Zionism and the broader Western liberalism within which it was ensconced. Hence the extraordinary censorship of Palestine solidarity and the crushing of student encampments during the twilight of the Biden era. Palestinians and their allies, meanwhile, continue to insist that their story must be told on Palestinian terms, once and for all.
The publication of El-Kurd’s book, which uses inverted triangles to mark the end of each chapter, attests to this breakdown. The epilogue alludes to this paradox of unprecedented Zionist terror matching and masking unprecedented cultural and moral weakness. “Zionism, behind the facade of the impenetrable superpower it purports to be,” El-Kurd concludes,
is more vulnerable today than ever. [. . .] Zionism may remain a formidable opponent, but it is also an aging, trembling beast, blinded by its own significance, un - predictable as it may be. Sometimes it pounces on you and pierces its fangs in your flesh. Other times it is but a paper tiger. And it is this discovery that not only shatters the myth of colonial invincibility but also reminds us that liberation is attainable, the future is within reach.
Peter Beinart provides a different kind of witness than ElKurd. His book is a cri de coeur from an anguished Jewish liberal who wonders, “How does someone like me, who still considers himself a Jewish loyalist, end up being cursed on the street by people who believe Jewish loyalty requires my excommunication?” The question is prompted by Beinart’s intensely personal survey of Jewish reactions to what he calls the “destruction of Gaza” in order to ponder the immorality of the “story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams” of Palestinian victims. Although Beinart eschews using the word genocide to describe the systematic obliteration of Palestinian society and humanity in Gaza—and that is a telling editorial decision—he does not hide the shocking reality of what Israel has done, nor the extraordinary denial of mostly Zionist Jewish organizations, families, and friends that allows them collectively to watch the “flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name—and shrug, if not applaud.”
Beinart offers a scathing indictment of contemporary collective and individual indifference toward human suffering— his Jewish friends and acquaintances who see but do not provide witness. Beinart deplores how they sustain a story of their own victimization, no matter the reality on the ground for Palestinians. Beinart still wants community with these Jews—he wants to break bread with them, but “not as masters of the house.”
“Whether this realization will ever become more general is still to be seen. And even when and if that happens, in all likelihood it will be far too late.”
Beinart offers an intimate glimpse into how American Jews who are steeped in the ideology and indoctrination of Zionism and who largely subscribe to its anti-Palestinian myths have chosen to embrace a state that is committing horror and depravity on millions of others. He is not interested here in Christian Zionists. Rather, he is truly appalled by what he describes as “Jewish exceptionalism” and the “insanity of mainstream Jewish discourse about Gaza.” He explains how the weaponized discourse about a “new new antisemitism” (which he notes was first evoked in the 1970s and then repeatedly harnessed to intimidate critics of Israel, as opposed to the actual antisemitism that Beinart is deeply and understandably concerned about) is designed to silence solidarity with Palestinians and to cover up Israeli apartheid and genocide. Beinart is strongly opposed to the conflation of the State of Israel with Judaism. He notes that such a conflation may serve the present racist State of Israel, but not an emancipated ethical Jewish future. He takes direct aim at organizations such as the ADL, which claim to be fighting discrimination while actually supporting genocide and defaming anti-Zionist Jewish solidarity with the Palestinians. Beinart sums up the dangerous implication of the conflation of Zionism and Jewishness: “Reject Zionism and you’re no longer a Jew. You’re an honorary Palestinian, and thus capable only of menacing Jews, not of being menaced yourself. Your safety becomes dispensable.”
Beinart understands Jewish fears and anxieties at the same time as he carefully dissects how those engaged in denial of Palestinian life view the world through Zionist indoctrination and affect. He illustrates how they interpret the events of October 7, 2023 as another episode in the long lachrymose history of age-old antisemitism that the State of Israel was meant to break once and for all. He appreciates the psychological shock that such an attack had on these individuals, many of whom Beinart affirms are decent, moral, and intelligent people tragically blinded by their own communalism.
Yet in an effort to reach out to this Jewish audience, Beinart paradoxically concedes ground to anti-Palestinian tropes and to the very communal anxieties he is seeking to overcome. For example, he puts himself in the shoes of Jewish students, whom he claims have been traumatized and ostracized by the wave of Palestinian solidarity that has been expressed as a revulsion for the ideology of the State of Israel. He appeals, moreover, for a better understanding of Martin Buber’s advocacy of bi-nationalism while simultaneously glossing over Buber’s underlying commitment to colonialism in Palestine. After listing a series of atrocities committed by Hamas, Beinart states, “I wish more pro-Palestinian activists had clearly committed themselves to the rules of war. I wish they had acknowledged that, morally, not all intifadas are the same.”
Nevertheless, despite such pleas indicating that Beinart is clearly not writing to Palestinians, Beinart is truly terrified by how the Gaza genocide has brought Jews and modern Judaism to a crossroads: in his view, one road leads to utter dehumanization and ultimately an end to ethical Judaism; the other, to a rehumanization and the salvation of an ethical Jewish community alongside Palestinians rather than a corrosive relationship of racial supremacy over non-Jewish Palestinians. Beinart proceeds to deconstruct the brutal wall of Zionist denial and racism step by step and mantra by mantra.
Beinart is caught between two worlds: a liberal world of individual choice that he is unable to abandon and the colonized Palestinian world that El-Kurd describes—one he knows exists but cannot fully comprehend, let alone enter, try as he might. In contrast to El-Kurd’s humanization of Palestinian life, including its resistance, Beinart quickly dismisses Hamas as “a corrupt and despotic organization with a long history of brutality against both Israelis and Palestinians.” He insists, moreover, that “Palestinians, like all people, are responsible for their actions,” although he also admits that there are “better analogies” than comparing the Palestinian uprising to another Holocaust. He points to the violence of the anticolonial and anti-slave revolution in Haiti in the late 18th century, Indigenous uprisings in America in the 19th century, and more recent 20th-century anticolonial revolts in Kenya. In other words, Beinart does not deny the long history of colonial Zionism or Israeli settler colonialism, context, or history that has devastated Palestinian society and life; but neither, crucially, does he appreciate how a reading of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins might have augmented, and perhaps altered, his profound commitment and faith in the autonomy and absolutism of individual morality that runs through his account.
Instead Beinart grapples with and draws on the emancipatory parables and wisdom of the Hebrew Bible to interpret for his Jewish (and American) readership the plight of the Palestinians. But the paradox is evident: he tries to translate for his Jewish audience a Palestinian experience that he himself is unable to fully comprehend. In his account, Palestinians remain, unlike the Bible and unlike those of his Jewish relatives and friends who have excommunicated him, abstract, untranslatable except as passive victims, rather than a living people that resists its own oppression and annihilation. His commitment, in other words, is to preserve what he sees as a Jewish morality undermined by the Zionism embodied in the apartheid State of Israel. Like Hans Kohn, the Prague-born Jewish scholar who moved to Palestine but abandoned colonial Zionism in 1929, disturbed by the collective Zionist indifference and racism toward the native Palestinians, it is not Arabs that Beinart is ultimately concerned with here—something suggested, perhaps, by Beinart’s reference to himself as a “Jewish loyalist.” But even more than Kohn, Beinart understands that Zionism has inextricably intertwined the fate of Jews and Judaism with the fate of the ever more brutalized Palestinians.
Beinart’s communal appeal and focus allow him to potentially reach a Jewish readership and say certain things typically denied to Palestinians like El-Kurd. The final chapter, “Korach’s Children,” reminds Beinart’s readers what became of Korach, who claimed intrinsic Jewish sanctity and rebelled against Moses, only to be destroyed by God. The contemporary implication is clear: the State of Israel, with its capricious power of life and death over millions of subjugated Muslim and Christian Palestinians, and which appears to command the loyalty of Jewish people around the world, has entered the Jewish people and faith into moral, religious, and ethical danger that recalls the story of Korach. The depravity of Israel is not simply in its power to subjugate and kill Palestinians, but in its bid to become an object of veneration. Beinart writes that such idolatry leads Jewish Zionists to walk “in the footsteps of Korach” and to believe that “no matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite.” Indeed, Beinart laments that “in most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.” His jeremiad deplores how Jews “who deify Jewish supremacy” and who appear to worship “a country that elevates Jews over Palestinians [and thus] replaces Judaism’s universal God” have not only strayed from the religious ethical tradition of Judaism that Beinart espouses, but have walked right into a supremacist trap from which there is no escape for Jews or Palestinians. If anti-Zionist Jewish dissidents are no longer considered Jews by Zionists, Beinart recognizes the flipside: the virulent nationalists and white supremacists who hate Jews as much as they hate immigrants and Muslims and Palestinians can shield their hatred by professing their love of the State of Israel. “To defend tribal supremacy in Israel,” he writes, “we’re empowering tribal supremacy in the United States and Europe, where we’re not even the dominant tribe.”
Whether this realization will ever become more general is still to be seen. And even when and if that happens, in all likelihood it will be far too late. In the meantime, as the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians continues unabated, the least any of us can do is to record our witness to one of the great calamities of our age and to mark, in whatever way and to whatever audience, our profound and total revulsion at its occurrence. But it is imperative to remember that when all is said and done, no matter how many books have been written about genocides in the past and how many more will be written about genocides in the future, far too many people justified genocide in the present. And far too many colleagues and citizens who could know more, and certainly should know more, chose instead to be silent or indifferent in the face of genocide, yet again.