Peter Beinart’s bewildering path

I know it’s wrong, but I’m starting to feel bad for Peter Beinart. Sure, he’s a columnist at the New York Times, a tenured professor at CUNY, and he has a best-selling new book out called Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. But I’m worried he’s alienated so many readers by now, Zionists and non-Zionists alike, that the guest list at his Purim party is going to be very sparse indeed: a few colleagues from CUNY perhaps, his editors from the Times, and a conga line of rabbis from the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect.

Beinart used to be a fairly conventional left-liberal critic of Israel. His 2012 book The Crisis of Zionism, blurbed by Bill Clinton, argued that Israeli democracy can’t survive the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The American Jewish establishment’s unwavering support for Bibi Netanyahu, he wrote, dooms any future resolution of the conflict. He annoyed plenty of Israel supporters, but he still favored a two-state solution. Today the book feels almost mainstream – it could easily serve as the foreign-policy plank of the Democratic Party platform.

More recently, however, he has gone bewilderingly rogue. In 2020, he wrote a column in the New York Times headlined “Why I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.” This year’s book goes even further. He not only opposes a Jewish state, he lays the blame for the entire 100-year Middle East conflict, including the current war in Gaza, squarely on Zionism, which he crudely redefines as nothing less than “Jewish supremacy.”

A two-state solution may feel deader than ever, but what he’s demanding now is something even more unlikely. And why choose the occasion of the October 7 catastrophe and the ensuing war to give up on diplomatic solutions, negotiated compromises, even a military defeat of Hamas, and demand instead the dissolution of the Jewish state and its replacement with an Arab-majority state, a fantasy where he insists Jews and Arabs will be able to live together in peace and harmony? It’s very odd, to say the least.

He can cosplay as Nelson Mandela, but his plan comes across more like Donald Trump. By proposing a utopia that’s as far-fetched and self-indulgent as Trump’s vision of luxury hotels and casinos along a Gazan Riviera, Beinart has not only lost nearly all his old audience, he’s going to alienate most of his newfound pro-Palestinian fans. Because they don’t support a Jewish presence of any kind in their future Arab state.

Beinart criticizes pro-Palestinian campus protesters for using incendiary, anti-Jewish language. He may agree with “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” but he doesn’t think “We don’t want two states, we want all of ’48,” or waving Hamas flags, praising Yahya Sinwar, and chanting “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” is helpful..

His vision of peaceful co-existence, not Arab supremacy, with 8 million Jews still being allowed to stay in the Holy Land after they’ve surrendered their state, may be demanding too much, not just of Israelis, but of Palestinians too. He told NPR, “One can be outraged by the system of oppression that Israel maintains over Palestinians and still recognize that the lives of Israeli Jews are deeply, deeply precious.” But that’s a tall order for his newfound friends on the extreme anti-Zionist left, where calls for genocidal war and the erasure of all Jewish rights to the land are the order of the day. If the BDS movement is calling for a boycott of the Oscar-winning anti-Occupation documentary No Other Land, how does Beinart expect to escape their eventual wrath?

Palestinian are understandable; Israelis are unforgivable

Beinart’s arguments aren’t very convincing anyway. He musters facts and footnotes like a student debater, selectively citing whichever one-sided sources support his premise while ignoring the wealth of information that would challenge his priors or add some necessary nuance.

Palestinian violence is a reaction to Israel, he argues, never the other way around. Antisemitism is only a danger when it comes from the right. Jewish victimhood is a myth that Jews use to cover up the truth about Israel’s moral depravity. American Jews worship Israel instead of worshipping God. He favors blunt assertions backed up with a token “source” – more often than not another journalist or professor with their own self-serving sources. Beinart is too smart not to know perfectly well there’s another side. His footnotes are his Achilles’ heel.

For example, he blithely mocks observers who question Gazan casualty figures supplied by Hamas, but never addresses the many thoughtful analyses that reveal glaring inconsistencies in the very numbers he relies on.

He never provides any roadmap to peace, but simply claims that Palestinian lambs will lay down with Israeli lions because that’s what happened in South Africa and Northern Ireland and he’s found a few academic studies to suggest it’s possible. He cites the South African anti-Apartheid movement as proof that if Israelis would simply hand over their country to an Arab majority, all will be well, quoting a Columbia professor’s assertion that “once a nonviolent way of ending Apartheid appeared as an alternative,” violence there ended almost overnight. Possibly, but he doesn’t mention that in the Middle East, the Oslo Accords also provided “a nonviolent way” to peaceful co-existence, yet Palestinians responded with waves of suicide bombings.

He offers up the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland as a model, but he never mentions that nearly a century of sectarian violence only came to an end once the British army had so forcefully suppressed the IRA’s paramilitary wing that the leadership finally gave up any hope of achieving their goals through terror. Palestinian armed groups could benefit from that lesson, to be sure, but so far, they haven’t.

Beinart skates past all of it, demanding instead that enough international pressure be brought to bear on Israel to force the dissolution of the Israeli state, without regard for the violent consequences that would surely come to pass in the unlikely event that his wish were ever granted.

In the end, he sticks with the idea that Palestinian violence and rejectionism can be overlooked because, in context, it is simply an understandable response to Israeli intransigence and oppression. But when Israel fights back with rage and fury, that’s unmitigated evil for which there is only one solution. Palestinians are fighting for freedom and human rights, even if a few bad apples occasionally behave like fascists and terrorists. Yet, Israelis are unforgivable. They are the executors of a deadly and dangerous inheritance. They can’t help it.

I’m bewildered by why he chose this current path. He could have maintained the positions he held in 2012, making common cause with left-liberal Zionists in America and anti-occupation activists in Israel who oppose the Netanyahu government. He could have focused on building alliances with Palestinian moderates who are willing to work with Israeli Jews. After all, he was winning that debate among American liberals, and more American Jews agree with that position than ever before.

So why up the ante? I’m no psychologist, but judging by the fact that he frequently mentions how high a price he has paid for his views and how many friends he’s lost, perhaps he thought that by pushing even further along the same road, he’d find a new community to make up the difference. But Beinart’s timing is dreadful. In the shadow of October 7th, his new allies are now more convinced than ever that there is only one solution, and Peter Beinart is not part of it.