Peter Beinart’s Rapture

Readers of the Sunday New York Times had their hands full last weekend with a 4000-word screed warning of an impending catastrophe in American Jewish identity and Israel-diaspora relations. The author’s hypothesis is that we are in for a great “rupture:” American Jews will either become Trumpian fellow travelers or stick to our progressive leanings and renounce Zionism. I was tempted to use the familiar “track-changes” tool to insert comments and corrections after each of Peter Beinart’s paragraphs, but I’ll focus here on just some of the doozies.

Let’s look first at his misuse of terms such as “liberalism,” by which he really means a kind of left-leaning progressivism that in its most familiar flavors tilts away from genuine liberalism. Words matter to the logic of arguments, so right from the start we should take Beinart’s thesis with a grain of salt. (Having read him for years now, I admit to being on a high sodium diet.) Definitional rigor aside, Beinart rehearses the increasingly popular fiction that there has always been a conflict between Zionist nationalism and liberal democracy. We see a lot of this nonsense these days, usually coated in veneers of “settler colonialist” and “ethnonationalist” rhetoric, even from historians and rabbis exalting the virtues of Jewish exile, signing letters decrying Israeli “apartheid,” or affiliating with avowedly anti-Zionist congregations (such as Tzedek Chicago). They may have been infected with postmodernist antibodies to factual evidence, but the New York Times, if not Beinart, should know better: Do the names David Ben Gurion, Ber Borochov, and Golda Meir ring any bells? Has the word Histadrut been redacted from the Times editors’ desk references? As a more learned writer cogently put it in a recent issue of Liberties, “liberal nationalism…is the philosophy that guided Israel’s founders” (italics added). I can imagine Beinart wincing at my omission of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Menahem Begin, and Bibi Netanyahu; but even as Israel has drifted from utopian aspirations of the kibbutz generation, as socialist labor is no longer the country’s dominant political ideology, and as religious/geographical extremism has reared an ugly head, the suggestion that a Jewish state is the enemy of liberalism – in either Beinart’s or in the correct definition of the term – is historically and theoretically bankrupt.

Beinart argues deceptively that “from 1948 to 1966, Israel held most of its Palestinian citizens under military law… [and] since 1967 … has ruled millions of Palestinians who hold no citizenship at all.” Although it is true that a form of military law was in place, he conveniently omits Israel’s efforts throughout that period to afford rights and economic opportunity to the Arab minority. As at least one legal historian has shown, “Starting in the late 1950s, Israeli policy makers … adopted measures to promote the integration of Arab workers into the civil service and other predominantly Jewish institutions and businesses…” Those were policies which, “though not yet called ‘affirmative action’ would be recognized as such today.” (In the US that idea – presumably on Beinart’s list of good liberal policy – came later, was always hotly debated, and is now essentially outlawed.)

As for the plight of Palestinians post-1967, it is true the occupation has brought misery; but it is worth noting that since the Oslo accords much of the West Bank has been under Palestinian civil rule and that from 2005 to last October Israel has had neither political nor military control of Gaza. Moreover, by measures of progress in higher education, infant mortality, literacy, LGBTQ rights, and economic productivity, life actually improved in the contested territories starting roughly in 1968. American Jewish liberals who worry about inequality, racial justice, and the slow pace of improvement for African Americans and other minority groups might want to look to their Israeli cousins for inspiration. In any case, the tiresome refrain that Israel has to choose between being Jewish and democratic is fundamentally flawed, for reasons I tried to enumerate in a recent post on the Medium website. My argument, briefly, was that anyone who thinks Israel cannot be Jewish and democratic should have witnessed the massive protests during most of 2023, bringing together a remarkably diverse and dedicated crowd of believers in “demokratia,” as it said on many of their tee shirts. And if that’s not enough evidence of a deeply rooted commitment to democratic values – including the right to protest – then how the movement pivoted, after October 7, into a stunning display of collective responsibility, certainly should arouse at least some affection, if not optimism, about the sturdiness of Israeli democracy. For context, liberal Americans who protested the war in Vietnam, as I did, never got close to the sustained numbers of Israelis who came out against their government’s ill-advised reform plans.

Beinart builds from the false accusation that Zionism = supremacy (if this sounds like a famous UN resolution of 1975, it’s not coincidental) to make his case that American Jews “[who] understand that liberal America is becoming less ideologically hospitable… are responding by forging common cause with the American right.” His evidence? Somewhat predictably, he exploits what most liberal-minded Jews I know regretted, namely the Anti-Defamation League’s decision to honor Jared Kushner. Whatever plausible political calculations might have motivated ADL leadership, the part of the story that Beinart omits is the visceral reaction of so many American Jews who were puzzled and dismayed by the Kushner prize.

This sort of cherry-picking is Beinart’s forte. He selectively harvests unripe findings from recent surveys, adds sour interpretations clearly of his own imagination, and cleverly neglects data that might challenge his project. For example, he talks about “American Jews who are … jettisoning Zionism because they can’t reconcile it with the liberal principle of equality under the law …” But hold on: where in the Gallup or Pew data questionnaire are there items that directly address tensions between Zionism and “equality under the law?” I don’t mind a bit of literary license, but this is truly reckless driving. It is true that some results point to changing attitudes of American Jews, which people who care about the future of Israel-diaspora relations (especially those who work on college campuses) find very concerning. And yes, some American Jews are siding with Hamas in the current war, even to the point of carrying banners calling for global intifada. But here’s some data Beinart skipped: even with the recorded shifts, “nine-in-ten U.S. Jewish adults (89%) say that, regardless of how acceptable they find the way Israel is carrying out the war in Gaza, Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are at least somewhat valid, including 74% who say its reasons are completely valid.” Does that sound like “jettisoning?” Though Beinart mentions the “generational divide,” how to interpret the gap between 18–29-year-olds and those over 65 is not obvious. But to the extent that a nontrivial number of youth who want “Palestine free from the river to the sea” don’t know which river or which sea, I would add a few more grains of salt to Beinart’s stew.

Beinart’s coup de [dis]grace is his choice of literary sources. Edward Said? Really?? Even the traditionally left-leaning Ha’aretz newspaper saw through Said’s slime, and ran a commentary blasting this “idol of the Puritan left” for his role in blinding many people to the threats of Islamist fanaticism, not exactly irrelevant to the post-October 7 eruption of antisemitism worldwide. Beinart has been touting the one-state solution since at least 2020, so it’s not surprising he would cite Said, who had been pushing that idea since he became disillusioned by the Oslo process (circa 1993). As the distinguished historian Efraim Karsh revealed in his 2003 book called “Arafat’s War,”, Said once opined that “I don’t find the idea of a Jewish state terribly interesting… the Jews are a minority everywhere. They are a minority in America. They can certainly be a minority in Israel.” Does Beinart agree that the story of Israel is not interesting? (He sure spends a lot of time and op-ed space on a boring topic.) Does he agree that it’s time for Jews to return to their minority status everywhere in the world? Good to know.

Is there anything in Beinart’s centerfold that is worth contemplating? For sure. But there is so much brush to clear and so many offensive slurs embedded in it that I’m afraid many readers will just be overwhelmed. Aside from his slippery use of data and selective omission of historical evidence, what’s disturbing in the argument is its tone of inevitability. Like many commentators these days, Beinart suffers from a self-imposed blockade in the supply chain of humility. Worse, though, try as he might, he can’t quite conceal his schadenfreude in reporting on the impossibility and imminent demise of liberal Zionism.

What might a lover of Zion do with the same data? Join me in a quick mind game. Suppose for a moment that for all kinds of legitimate reasons American Jews are disturbed by the suffering in Gaza, which for some of them intensifies their quandary over loyalty to Israel and loyalty to liberal democracy (a rift that had already been festering before October 7). Suppose also that some of their misgivings stem from incomplete knowledge or misunderstanding of wickedly complex problems, and not from a foundational hostility to Jews or Judaism or even Israel. This would be an occasion to provide constructive guidance and reinforce, rather than further weaken, ties between American and Israeli Jews who still care (and who are, thankfully, still in the majority). It would be an occasion to correct some of the hyperbolic anti-Israel “reporting” that has so blurred people’s capacity to know what is going on. (Readers should check a recent article by an urban warfare expert at West Point, in Newsweek, March 25.) Tragically though, Beinart used his primo real estate in the Times for a different purpose: to pour fuel on the flames of ignorance and perpetuate a rhetoric that lays blame for the whole conflict – including decades of Arab intransigence and Palestinian terrorism – primarily or solely on Israel.

Might there be a rupture between liberal-minded American Jews and Zion? Yes, but instead of trying to prevent it, Beinart seems to be enjoying the prospect. Is it too coy to suggest that from the rupture he finds rapture?

Michael Feuer is dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development and professor of education policy at the George Washington University. The views expressed here are his own, and do not necessarily represent the school, the university, or its leadership.