Peter Beinart appears to be progressively adopting and promoting extreme, radical and dangerous positions vis à vis Israel. Having rejected the idea of a Jewish state and watching his IfNotNow kids increasingly adopting slogans and catchphrases that would not embarrass right-wing, white supremacist, antisemitic nationalists, it is becoming obvious that a certain crass perverseness is characterizing his/their politics.
The morphing of IfNotNow’s progressive anti-Zionism with hardline antisemitic memes is most apparent as regards how they view the role AIPAC fulfills, notably on its Instagram platform, especially highlighting its money aspect, echoing Marx’s 1843 statement: “Money is the jealous god of Israel” tirade.
To return to journalist and author Beinart, in advertising his podcast with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, he termed Coates’s anti-Israel tirades as something of “courage.” When Coates declares that “Israel is not a democracy,” Beinart shakes his head approvingly and utters, “Yeah.”
In a New York Times op-ed on Nov. 7, Beinart subtlety supports the calumny that Israel is perpetrating “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, writing: “even amid what prominent scholars call a genocide” without any qualification or suggesting any doubt. He doesn’t even make the effort to somehow disprove Israel’s claims that that is not happening.
In addition, he asserts Americans protest Israel’s actions in Gaza because “their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral.” In other words, Israel is immoral. It doesn’t bother him to ask why are so many American Jews targeted—their persons and their businesses. Why were the windows of Char Bar, a kosher restaurant in Washington, D.C., broken on the anniversary of Kristallnacht?
It isn’t Beinart’s interest to defend Jews? Could this act and so many more be the result of left-wing progressive antisemitism or Muslim Jew-hatred? Or does his pro-Palestinianism blind him to the incidentals of the day?
His main point, however, is in his summation: “Democrats—who claim to respect human equality and international law—must begin to align their policies on Israel and Palestine with these broader principles.”
For Beinart, supporting Palestinian freedom has become central to what it means to be progressive. Nevertheless, he sees “the struggle for Palestinian freedom as a taboo.” As such, it is an exception to the required agenda items that the Democrats need to adopt as action items. However, “Palestinians in Gaza and beyond have been paying for that exception with their lives. Now Americans are paying, too. It may cost us our freedom.”
What Beinart is suggesting is that Donald Trump was elected basically because of a conspiracy theory—one more theory IfNotNow pushes, which is that Jewish money beholden to Israel is taking control of American politics. He is intimating that Americans are like Palestinians, suffering a lack of freedom, as they have been “excepted” as taboo.
Of course, anyone reviewing the past year’s events on school campuses, via the media and in the streets of American cities will not be convinced of that line of reasoning, even if no American of Palestinian descent was allowed to address the Democratic Party convention.
Beinart has chosen to situate himself in a far-out corner of ideological radical politics. In doing so, he has imprisoned himself in an unforgiving worldview, and its nature is to continue to push its believers further into the nonsensical.
In addition to his teaching position, Beinart is editor-at-large for Jewish Currents. He is not, it may be assumed, responsible for everything that appears in this magazine. He nevertheless should be responsible for reacting to its content, and either agreeing with it or distancing himself from it.
In its last issue, its editor conversed extensively with Abdaljawad Omar, a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University. In that exchange, the issue of “mirroring” came up, which claims that the force that Israel uses to defend itself is somehow a mirror image of the force Arabs employ to “resist.”
Omar is asked how to relate to the conflict’s violence, ethically and spiritually, and, as the question is framed: “the logic on both sides becomes mirrored.”
He responds by awarding the violence done by Arabs on behalf of a free Palestine a greater positive value: “Palestinian resistance is not merely a mirror of Israeli violence. … There is a crucial distinction between violence that seeks to sustain domination and violence that seeks to liberate from it. Palestinian resistance is animated by this latter impulse, a drive not for subjugation but for self-determination, which holds within it the possibility of imagining a new framework of relations.”
It is rather unfortunate that the editor could not find the knowledge to adequately counter Omar’s tripe. She could have challenged him that Arabs of British Mandatory Palestine, from the outset, employed the most horrific forms of violence, starting in 1920, including rape, murder, dismemberment and incineration—all directed at civilians. And never did they utilize modes of diplomacy, negotiations or compromise. Outright rejectionism was their choice, then as now.
She could have asked if this “resistance” was not specific to Palestine but an extension of Islamist imperialism, as Richard Landes explains. Perhaps she has not read that much or perhaps she marches along with Beinart, seeking to somehow elevate the Mufti-Arafat-Hamas terror along with denigrating the right of Jews to defend themselves.
On these and many more fronts where Jews are facing insult, hate, denigration and outright violence, Beinart and cohorts are proving themselves crassly immoral. And unconscionably wrong.
