‘For Peter Beinart, focusing on the right of Jews to be secure from terrorists is immoral’

Peter Beinart wants us to feel sorry for him: “When I enter a synagogue, I am no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away.”

Well, I’ll fathom a guess. Every shul has its version of a Beinart – the intellectually gifted wiseacre who thinks that he has some sort of special insight denied to the rest of the community. For the most part, they humour him. He may be pompous; he may be irritating. But he is essentially harmless. They will, of course, shake his hand, even if they might not want to break bread with him.

But sometimes this Beinart goes a stage further, flaunting a supposed moral superiority based on the repudiation of almost everyone and everything that holds the community of which he is a part together. So subsumed does he become in his self-righteousness that everything fuels his ego – and when the shul members start to give him a wide berth, that itself adds to his belief that they are not on his moral plane.

This is a book that not only need never have been written but that does not need to be read.

The actual Peter Beinart was once interesting. A former editor of the New Republic in the days when it was a serious journal, he was a mainstream liberal Zionist who wrote well and thought provokingly. But over the past decade, from the publication in 2012 of The Crisis of Zionism, he has travelled so far across the terrain of liberal Zionism that he has left it altogether and become an avowed anti-Zionist – a campaigner for the abolition of Israel altogether, to be replaced by a single state with full equality between Palestinians and Israelis. He has become that shul parody, hawking his self-proclaimed moral superiority around as if the rest of us should be grateful to have such a man in our midst, rather than feeling ashamed of him.

That has been given full rein in his latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. This is a book that not only need never have been written but that does not need to be read.

Its most obvious pointlessness is that it is simply boring, a predictable regurgitation of every slander against Israel. We get ethnic cleansing, apartheid, massacres and all the usual stuff. Why bother with Beinart when this is the everyday diet of the media? Beinart jazzes it up with a rant against anyone even vaguely associated with speaking up for Israel in the wake of the October 7 massacre. If that sounds repulsive, it is because it is. Beinart goes through the motions of condemning what happened on October 7 but spends far longer attacking those who have stood up for Israel since then. As he writes at the start, in his “note to my former friend”: “I consider your single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral and self-defeating.” Think about that for a second (because that is all it is worth). For Beinart, focusing on the right of Jews to be secure from terrorists is “immoral”.

If you’re worried about the impact on Jews of having to live alongside Palestinians in a single state – if you’re worried, that is, that they would be slaughtered – then don’t be, because Beinart says it worked in South Africa so it will work in the new not-Israel state. And that’s it. That is the entire basis on which he thinks the world should take the leap into deciding that the Jews no longer need a state.

Actually, that’s not quite it because we are all wrong to have noticed an increase in antisemitism since October 7. It hasn’t happened. We know this because Beinart asserts it, and he is so much wiser than the rest of us. Chants of ‘from the river to the sea’ are “ironic” because “there already is a country that extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan”. Oh, clever point! It’s not about Jew hate at all but rather is used by those crafty Zionists: “Labelling the slogan antisemitic — even genocidally antisemitic — turns public attention away from how Israel is treating Palestinians now, especially in Gaza, and redirects attention toward how Palestinians might treat Jews were they in charge. It replaces the actual subjugation that Palestinians experience as an oppressed people with the theoretical subjugation that Jews might experience were the shoe on the other foot.”

Beinart uses the same logic to defend usage of the phrase “intifada” and other slogans such as, “when people are occupied, resistance is justified”. Indeed for Beinart the phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” is actually worse and more threatening than “intifada” or “resistance is justified.”

Perhaps one should feel sorry for Beinart, who is so consumed in his loathing of Israel that he appears to have lost all sense. He writes that spraying anti-Zionist graffiti on the walls of an Israeli embassy and a synagogue are equally fine because “they are both, in their essence, Zionist institutions.” Despite him insisting that Zionism is entirely separate to Judaism, a synagogue is nonetheless a “Zionist institution”. Go figure.

But in any case, none of this is antisemitic, he maintains, just as nothing we have seen on campus since October 7 is about Jews: “The data is clear: the vast majority of campus progressives distinguish between Jews and Israel.”

But how can one feel sorry for someone who now devotes his life to spreading such calumnies about Israel, about Jews, and about those who speak up for Israel and Jews. As for whether to shake Beinart’s hand: would you?