Journalist Peter Beinart was upset by Elise Stefanik’s answer in response to a question posed by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) about whether or not “Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank.” She confirmed (video at 24:45) it was her belief with a one-word “Yes.” Hollen reacted to that forthright statement, saying it was one “not held by the founders of the State of Israel, who were secular Zionists, not religious.”
Although Van Hollen is not a subject of this column, I think it proper to point out that on Jan. 7, 1937, in his testimony before the British Royal (Peel) Commission, David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency, declared: “The Bible is our mandate.” In 1956, with the conquest of Sinai, he had spoken about “the rebirth of the kingdom of Solomon.”
Beinart, in a short clip he distributed, thinks Stefanik is wrong. He is also convinced that the Bible does not grant Jews “unconditional sovereignty over the West Bank.”
How wrong? Her statement is “absurd.” For Beinart, “public policy based on appeals to sacred texts that are sacred to some people but not others” should not be. Rather, there is the framework of international law that “determines whether Israel has the right to control the West Bank.”
Moreover, what truly bothers Beinart is that “Stefanik’s understanding of the Bible, as I understand it, is completely wrong from the perspective of Jewish tradition.” Jews, he posits, have no “unconditional political control over the West Bank or any other part of what we call Eretz Israel, the land of Israel.” Beinart knows this because he’s read Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro’s The Empty Wagon. It’s “quite a remarkable book,” he thinks.
One reviewer of the book notes that Shapiro is related through marriage to the previous Satmar Rebbe, Rav Yoel Teitelbaum, who laid out the Satmar doctrine on Zionism. The Empty Wagon, it seems, is “a disingenuous religious and political polemic that blames nearly all of the failings in the Jewish world of the past 150 years, including the Holocaust, on Zionism.” He is convinced that the book “is a seriously flawed work and Shapiro’s approach is histrionic, rather than logical.”
In another review, an Orthodox rabbi points out that saying the author’s “premise is grossly inaccurate is a serious understatement.” Beinart has gone off the deep end, it would appear.
Back in 2020, Neil Rogachevsky commented on a column by Beinart in The New York Times that called for an end to Israel: “A Jewish state has become the dominant form of Zionism. But it is not the essence of Zionism. The essence of Zionism is a Jewish home.” He observed that Berinart’s position is that of secular messianism, but “it is not a small irony that the main contemporary standard bearers for his policy proposal of a binational state are a strange subsect of Satmar Jews … .”
The leading light of the Satmar sect, Yoel Teitelbaum, viewed Zionists as “the descendants of the Erev Rav [‘mixed multitude’] and the Amalekites” in his Al Ha-Ge’ulah treatise (clause 61; p. 109), as Menachem Keren-Kratz details. An anti-Zionist ideological ally, Elchanan Wasserman, referred to modern secular parties as constituting “Amalek,” and their descendants are to be considered “the seed of Amalek.” Neturei Karta, spawned from Satmar and the allies of pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas forces like Nerdeen Kiswani, see Zionists as “Amalek’s accomplices.” Zalman Teitelbaum, Yoel’s nephew, has referred to the State of Israel as “this generation’s Amalek” and said that “the Zionists came from the seed of Amalek.”
Why is this important? It is important because Beinart, likewise, uses the same language to describe his criticism of Israeli leaders and Jews of Judea and Samaria. In a post from March 7, 2023, he wrote of Jewish “settlers … [who] see Palestinians as Amalekites” and that there are “exterminationist passages” in Tanach. He added there that the “Jewish supremacist state has unleashed a Frankenstein monster.” Can we expect Beinart to contemplate a move from Upper Manhattan to the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn?
As James A. Diamond and Menachem Kellner have written about Beinart ally-in-anti-Zionism Shaul Magid, who, in Tablet magazine in 2020, called for “serious engagement” with Satmar Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum’s anti-Zionist theology, “Rabbi Teitelbaum could not have cared less about Israel’s economic or foreign policy or about Palestinian rights—his anti-Zionism was directed at the very heart of the notion of a Jewish homeland. Magid’s sympathetic presentation of Teitelbaum’s doctrines strategically omits key details that would undermine his presentation of Teitelbaum’s anti-Zionism as a serious theological alternative.”
Since then, both Magid, who published The Necessity of Exile, in which he argues that “the political goal of Zionism—to establish a Jewish and democratic state—as an impossible contradiction,” and Beinart have seemed to have fallen down a rabbit hole of irremediable, self-imposed masochistic hopelessness. Beinart has quoted Rabbi Jonathan Sacks that Maimonides insisted we cannot identify any contemporary nation with Amalek.
Since Beinart sees quoting rabbis as proper, he should know that Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in his Kol Dodi Dofek, Chapter 10, explained regarding the commandment to destroy Amalek that he agreed with his father, Rabbi Moshe Soloveichik, that this commandment applies to any nation that acts like Amalek. His exact words:
“I repeated, in the name of my father (of blessed memory), that the notion of ‘the Lord will have war against Amalek from generation to generation’ (Exodus 17:16) is not confined to a certain race, but includes a necessary attack against any nation or group infused with mad hatred that directs its enmity against the community of Israel. When a nation emblazons on its standard, ‘Come, let us cut them off from being a nation so that the name of Israel shall no longer be remembered’ (Psalms 83:5), it becomes Amalek. In the 1930’s and 1940’s the Nazis, with Hitler at their helm, filled this role. In this most recent period they were the Amalekites, the representatives of insane hate.”
Most relevant to Beinart, he continued and said: “Today, the throngs of Nasser and the Mufti have taken their place.”
Yes, Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, a fascist and the leader of Palestinianism—and the self-described hero of PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Nasser, of course, refers to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian military officer and politician who served as the second president of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970 and consistently tried through pan-Arabism to eliminate Israel.
As Beinart has made repeated references to Iran, I doubt anyone other than he would be hard-pressed not to identify the Islamic Republic’s genocidal holocaust intentions toward Israel other than Amalek-like—not to mention what Hamas did (and insists that it will continue to do) in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Even so, Beinart has been described by the American intellectual historian Martin Jay as an “empathizer with the plight of the Palestinians,” and so I am well aware that it may be near-useless to argue with him.
He propagates the idea that “the holiness of land is separate from the question of political sovereignty,” as if Maimonides did not compose the “Laws of Kings and Wars,” the ultimate symbol of political sovereignty, or as if Nachmanides did not interpret the verse in Numbers 33:53, “You shall possess the Land and dwell in it,” as indicating possession denotes conquest and sovereignty. And our sages respected government, as said Rabbi Chanina: “Pray for the integrity of the government.”
Beinart wishes that we acknowledge his supposed wisdom in knowing that the genuine Jewish tradition is the centrality of human dignity, which is “one important condition in terms of your right to sovereignty.” For him, Stefanik’s words are a “crudely racist view of Palestinians” and in “deep ignorance of Jewish tradition.”
I’ll allow Soloveitchik a last word from the above-quoted section on Amalek in his Kol Dodi Dofek when he said: “Do not rely on the justice of the ‘liberal world.’ Those pious liberals were alive 15 years ago and witnessed the destruction of millions of people with equanimity and did not lift a finger. They are liable to observe, God forbid, the repetition of the bloodbath and not lose a night’s sleep.”
And, as if he were alive today, he added: “The Arabs have declared war not only on the State of Israel but on the entire Jewish people. They are now the leaders and financial supporters of international antisemitism.”
Are we to depend on Beinart and his ignorance for our Jewish tradition?