The Sad Evolution of Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart is a widely quoted anti-Zionist Jew, periodically writing New York Times opinion pieces. What is most troubling is not so much his evolution from a critical Zionist a decade ago but his genuflecting to some of the most extreme anti-Israel positions. This essay will discuss three incidents that document his descent, including the controversy over his November 25th talk at Tel Aviv University.

Beinart has embraced the most extreme position on the plight of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. In 2020, Beinart wrote that they could easily be absorbed, like Russian immigrants were, because many of the villages from which they came remain abandoned. For Beinart, it is irrelevant that more than 90 percent of this population never lived in Israel. He points to evidence that many descendants cling to artifacts of their parents and grandparents lost homes.
When Beinart mentioned this proposal to Rashid Khalidi, the influential Palestinian Columbia University professor, he told Beinart that Palestinians refugees are now more urbanized and don’t desire village life. In response, Beinart changed his proposal. Now he urged the Israeli government to give housing vouchers to all those Palestinians who wished to “return” to Israel.
Maybe Beinart should have proposed that aid be given to Palestinians to better their lives in the countries in which they have lived for three generations. In Jordan, there are one million stateless Palestinians who live in deplorable conditions. Lacking citizenship, they are excluded from valuable employment and housing choices. When a member of the Jordanian civil rights commission proposed integrating them, there was a decisive pushback. Opponents claimed, “Well, we don’t want to help Israelis achieve their goals by giving those people access to all types of activities and normal living so that they could forget about their right of return.”

There are also a few hundred thousand stateless Palestinians in Lebanon where restrictions on employment and housing are even worse. Again, maintaining the right-of-return is paramount. Indeed, in 2023 the UN Human Rights Commission demanded that it should be given priority. Somehow the anti-Israel proponents like Beinart have nothing to say about the abuses experienced by these stateless Palestinians.
Two years later, Beinart felt it necessary to give his full support to the outrageous claimTa-Nehisi Coates made in his book, The Message, on the treatment of Palestinians based on a ten-day trip he made to Israel in summer 2023. Coates focused his rhetoric on demonstrating that Israeli practices amount to apartheid by showing parallels to past South African and Jim Crow experiences. This enabled him to view Israel as engaging in white supremacy. When it was pointed out that half of the Jewish population are descended from nonwhite, refugees from Arab countries and Ethiopia, Peter Beinart was quick to defend Coates:

In Israel, supremacy is based on Jewishness not (America’s) definition of whiteness. So Black and brown Jews – whatever discrimination they face – enjoy legal supremacy over Palestinians.

Whatever one’s judgment on Israeli policies in the West Bank, Beinart’s assertion that black and brown Jews enjoy legal supremacy is false. Even most right-wing Zionists have been quite clear that on an individual basis, Jewish and Arab citizens should be able to compete for jobs and education without prejudice. The former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, has championed this position. He was crucial to the affirmative action efforts to integrate Arab citizens into the hi-tech sector. Today, their enrollment at Technion, Israel’s MIT, matches their share of the population; and Nazareth has become a hi-tech hub. Arab citizens are senior administrator in hospitals and government agencies, including the police.
Indeed, the preamble to the 2016 five-year plan to better the Arab community quoted Zvi Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism:

After the formation of a Jewish majority, a considerable Arab population will always remain in Palestine. If things fare badly for this group of inhabitants, then things will fare badly for the entire country. The political, economic and cultural welfare of the Arabs will thus always remain one of the main conditions for the well-being of the Land of Israel.

Unlike during the 2021 Gaza conflict, Arab-Jewish unity reigned and there was no rioting in the mixed Jewish-Arab cities. Most telling, the IDF-Hamas war increased the attachment of Arab citizens to the Israeli state. For each year, 2016-2022, the share of Arab citizens who felt a part of Israel fluctuated between 39% and 43%. But directly after the 2023 Hamas attack, it increased to 70%; and even during November as the death and destruction in Gaza mounted, it only declined to 65%.

The most recent genuflecting came after his Tel Aviv University talk. His purpose was to win over students to the position that Israel is an apartheid country, committing genocide in Gaza. And yet, he was vilified by pro-Palestinian organizations for speaking at a university that is complicit with the genocide in Gaza. Responding to this criticism, Beinart asked the movement for forgiveness for letting ‘my desire for that conversation override my solidarity with Palestinians.”
In each of the three instances, Beinart only focuses on appeasing the worst elements in the pro-Palestinian movement. He ignores the plight of stateless Palestinians, the dramatic improvement of Arab citizens, or the role of a college professor in promoting dialogue. Thus, Beinart is no longer the openminded, principled intellectual he was fifteen years ago.

Robert Cherry is a recently retired Brooklyn College economists and author of Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come? (Wicked Son Press, late January 2026).