Peter Beinart’s Embrace of Jewish Powerlessness and anti-Zionism

Peter Beinart has emerged as a major leader of the cult of ostensibly Jewish critics of Israel and Zionism. Or professional apologist might be a better description, after he spoke recently at Tel Aviv University (“to speak to Israelis about Israel’s crimes”) and was condemned by the chorus of socialmedia influencers for violating the holy boycott Israel movement. Beinart responded “I made a serious mistake. In the past, when formulating my views about Israel-Palestine, I’ve sought out Palestinian friends and interlocutors and listened carefully to their views. In this case, I did not.”

In contrast to his loyal followers in groups calling themselves “Jewish Voice for Peace” and “IfNotNow” Beinart has more than a trivial familiarity with Jewish tradition and texts, which he displays in presenting his views.

For example, In his mini anti-Zionist polemic, Being Jewish after the destruction of Gaza: A reckoning, Beinart selectively deploys Jewish texts and tradition in making his case. Chapter titles like “They Tried to Kill Us, We Survived, Let’s Eat” and “Korach’s Children” reflect a deep cynicism and snark. He spins the end of Book of Esther, when the Jews, led by Mordechai, attack and slaughter their opponents, or, in Beinart’s version: “with the blood of their enemies barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry.” In a side comment, he asserts “That’s the origin of Purim” – as opposed to the usual rabbinical interpretation emphasizing Jewish survival in the face of a genocidal enemy. This leads directly to the blood libel that belittles the October 7 Hamas atrocities in order to condemn the IDF response.

Similarly, he claims the mantles of earlier Jewish dissidents, including Korach, who led a rebellion against Moses under the banner of democracy; and of the mishnaic sage Elisha Ben Abuya, who was ostracized for, in Beinart’s version, disobeying rabbinical limits on the distance one is allowed to travel on Shabbat – “just as I have crossed boundaries…” A more accurate comparison is with Howard Jacobson’s “ASHamed Jews” in The Finkler Question, or the Yevsektsiya – the Jewish Bolsheviks used to liquidate Jewish existence, and were later liquidated themselves.

Beinart’s claim to fame (and well compensated employment, including via the foundation that supports Jewish Currents) is based on his “as a Jew” dismissal of Zionism, which he presents as “the very idea of a state that favors Jews over Palestinians.” Instead, he embraces Palestinian victimhood, which, in his invented history, results from a “single-minded focus on Israeli security,” which is “immoral and self-defeating.” Like some other Jews from South Africa and Israeli diplomats who have served there and are critics of Israeli policy, Beinart equates the Jewish state to the apartheid regime and turns Zionists into Jewish supremacists – a mockery that appears, in different forms, more than 30 times. As the apartheid regime was brought down and replaced, Beinart proclaims: “We [by which he means the Jewish people] need a new story – based on equality rather than supremacy.”

On the other side of the coin, Beinart describes terrorism, including the October 7 atrocities, as an inherently morally justified response. He also adopts the vocabulary of terror organizations and propaganda groups with terms like “armed resistance,” arguing that Palestinian Arab dispossession (ie Zionism) including “56 years of suffocating occupation” after the 1967 war, and “violent resistance are intertwined.” The life stories recited by Palestinian terrorists and Hamas propagandists are presented as evidence that they had no alternative.

In his imagined version of the Oslo disaster, Arafat and the PLO “renounced armed resistance,” including trading the goal of replacing Israel “from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea,” for creating a Palestinian Arab state next to Israel. This is complete fiction, as reflected in Arafat’s repeated bombastic declarations of imminent victory over the Jews, and the detailed planning of the suicide mass bombings known as the Second Intifada. Beinart also repeats the myth that the bombings were spontaneous violence triggered by Prime Minister Sharon’s visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in September 2000.

Similarly, Beinart erases the Arab rejection of the 1947 UN Partition plan and the war to “push the Jews into the sea” and 78 years of incitement and rejectionism. He makes no mention of the 1975 UN General Assembly resolution labeling Zionism and racism or the infamous and antisemitic 2001 UN Durban conference where his NGO allies launched the BDS movement through the labels of apartheid, genocide and war crimes.

In considering the deficiencies in Beinart’s argument, the critique by Professor Ruth Wisse is essential — particularly her book on Jews and Power (2007), on the contradictions between moral leadership in an ideal world and the reality of Jewish powerlessness in 2000 years of exile. With no means to defend themselves, some Jews made a virtue of an imaginary secular universalist messianism based on the mirage of universal justice.

Beinart ends his “reckoning” by telling Jews to liberate ourselves “from supremacy so, as partners with the Palestinians, we can help liberate the world.” The fact that the Palestinian Arabs and their antisemitic cheering section have no interest in a partnership with the Jews, or in Beinart’s twisted apologetica, is irrelevant.