How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation About Israel: Peter Beinart
Part 4
Full series here
Welcome to Part 4 of “How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation About Israel.” The purpose of this series is to provide the language needed to combat toxic and hateful rhetoric from anti-Israel influencers. For my next installment, I bring you a familiar face (which happens to be very punchable) of the As a Jew community of self-haters. I’ve written about him before, in my Rosh Hashana STFU special.
His name is
, and he’s become a darling of a specific slice of the New York Times-reading demographic. Let’s take a look at his latest op/ed, titled “States [Like Israel] Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People [Whom I Define as Oppressed] Do.”1 Special thanks to my friend for bringing it to my attention. You’ll find that while his arguments seem neat and tidy upon first glance, they quickly unravel with some scrutiny.The article is very long, so I’m going to focus only on specific passages that encapsulate his overall (stupid) argument:
If America’s leaders prioritized the lives of all those who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, it would become clear that asking if Israel has a right to exist is the wrong question. The better question is: Does Israel, as a Jewish state, adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its dominion? The answer is no.
It’s not the American (he means the United States) government’s responsibility to “prioritize the lives” of people living in foreign countries—they have their own leaders to do that (or not). It’s their job (ostensibly) to protect American interests. Beinart believes that “Israel does not protect the rights of all of the individuals under its dominion,” and for that reason, we cannot declare its right to exist. The problem is that if we were to judge the validity of nations’ existence based on that criteria, then the vast majority of all nations on Earth would need to not exist anymore.
Consider this scenario: If Scotland legally seceded, or Britons abolished the monarchy, the United Kingdom would no longer be united nor a kingdom. Britain as we know it would cease to exist. A different state would replace it. Mr. Rubio, Mr. Schumer and their colleagues would accept this transformation as legitimate because they believe that states should be based on the consent of the governed.
What the hell kind of analogy is this? Israel was never a monarchy. Palestinians, a people who never have had a state of their own, never “seceded.” For Beinart and his friends, the mortal sin is a failure to recognize Palestinian statehood, right? Should that state ever happen, the world would need to acknowledge its leadership (today, that would be either Hamas or the PA). Let’s say that tomorrow the people of the UK overthrew their monarchy (again, this has nothing to do with Israel). The state would still continue, just under a different type of political system and maybe a different name. Israel is a country born out of 19th- and 20th-century nationalism, and the UK out of a union between nations under a common monarch. He pulled this analogy right out of his ass.
What if we talked about Israel that way? Roughly half the people under Israeli control are Palestinian. Most of those — the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — cannot become citizens of the state that wields life-or-death power over them. Israel wielded this power in Gaza even before Hamas invaded on Oct. 7, 2023, since it controlled the Strip’s airspace, coastline, population registry and most of its land crossings, thus turning Gaza into what Human Rights Watch called “an open-air prison.”
“Half the people under Israeli control are Palestinian”? No. I understand that it’s easy to make up statements starting with “half of the people are…” under the assumption that no one will actually bother to look up the actual numbers. If he’s referring to the West Bank and Gaza as Palestinian territories “under Israeli control,” that population is ~5 million (2 million in Gaza, 3 million in the West Bank). The total population of Israel proper is ~10 million, 20% of whom are Arabs with the full benefits of Israeli citizenship (some may choose to self-identify as ‘Palestinian,’ but they carry Israeli passports). If we add the total population of Gaza and the West Bank to Israel’s, the total is ~15 million. 5 million / 15 million = 1/3.
But Israel’s relationship with “the occupied territories” is more complicated than Peter and his friends at Human Rights Watch make it. The residents of Gaza were not under “Israeli control” from 2005 - October 7th, 2023. During that period, they were under the dictatorship of Hamas. They also had billions of dollars of international money flowing in annually. Even if we accept the “open air prison” argument, there was no reason why they couldn’t have used those resources for the good of their own over funding terrorism—Israel certainly was not stopping them from implementing the former and would rather not have had to defend itself against the latter. The reason Gaza is under Israeli military invasion now is because their government started a war!
Yes, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank continues to be a major civil rights issue, and it’s worthy of discussion from knowledgeable observers of the conflict (of which Peter is not one). Even there, things are complicated. Under the current Oslo Accords, Israel doesn’t “control” all of it. The Palestinian Authority (PA), for example, controls the cities of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Jenin. In those cities alone, that’s ~400,000 Palestinians under the PA.
The perfunctory statistics aside, I find it curious that articles like this one purporting to advocate for Palestinians never once mention the role of actual Palestinian leadership.
American Jewish leaders don’t just insist on Israel’s right to exist. They insist on its right to exist as a Jewish state. They cling to the idea that it can be both Jewish and democratic despite the basic contradiction between legal supremacy for one ethno-religious group and the democratic principle of equality under the law.
Um, yes, American Jews (not just the “leaders”) tend to gravitate to the argument that Israel should exist as a Jewish state. The vast majority of us are Zionists, after all. Furthermore, Israel is a country where over 20% of its population does not subscribe to the established religion, yet enjoys the full rights of citizenship—and they are NOT Palestinians in the West Bank/Gaza. The majority of nations born in the 20th century, which includes most of Europe, are “ethnostates.” That does not make Israel unique in any way, except that it’s the only one that people question the legitimacy of. Gee, I wonder why.
Today, however, this form of idolatry — worship of the state — seems to suffuse mainstream American Jewish life. It is dangerous to venerate any political entity. But it’s especially dangerous to venerate one that classifies people as legal superiors or inferiors based on their tribe. When America’s most influential Jewish groups, like American leaders, insist again and again that Israel has a right to exist, they are effectively saying there is nothing Israel can do — no amount of harm it can inflict upon the people within its domain — that would require rethinking the character of the state.
Jews do not “worship” states, they worship one God (in theory). Just because Beinart worships the idols of the Palestine Industrial Complex doesn’t mean that American Zionists worship Israel. We criticize its government all the time. When Zionists like me state that Israel has a right to exist, it simply means that Jews have a right to self-determination. The concept itself has nothing to do with harming or displacing others. If Israel (and the USA by proxy) is inflicting harm—and with the current political environment being as it is, that is very much a topic for valid discussion—then we can talk about that without questioning Israel’s right to exist.
No nation on Earth should ever be questioned on its right to exist any more than any child born alive should be questioned on why they exist. They exist because they were born—end of discussion. Like any person or nation or empire in history, none will live forever. Which is why we fight for our survival now.
Peter Beinart publishes pieces like this in his pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with the current activist class that has deluded itself into believing that Israel and the United States are the worst countries on Earth. Of course, they’re also the two countries that have made Beinart’s success (and mine) possible—one raised him to be a supercilious twit; the other exists both for his own people’s safety and for him to bash as his full-time job.
To some of the goyim, he’s “one of the good ones.” To me, he’s just a common As a Jew. Of course, Peter’s ideas on this issue don’t actually serve any useful purpose in any discussions about how to address the crisis in the Middle East in a real way. I just have one question for our man Peter: are you trying to compensate for something?
Thanks for reading! If you made it this far, I have a small ask. The work of exposing lies and misinformation takes a lot of time and effort. I make all content of this series free so that as many people as possible can have access during these tough times in our war for truth. If you find my work informative and wish to support it, please consider either a paid subscription (link above) or a one-time donation (link below).
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If the dictionary had a picture next to the phrase "self-hating Jew", Beinart's is the one they would use. This guy went off the rails a very long time ago and pretty much everyone who follows the commentary on the middle east knows it. In every era, there are always people like Peter who earnestly believe that if Jews were just a little more understanding of our enemies feelings, if we just bowed down a little lower, all the hatred would eventually go away. These folks have always existed and they've always been wrong. Their nonsense is just another aggravation to be dealt with.
Yes! I actually knew Peter in college, though not well. He was very nice to me. We were both in the Liberal Party of the Yale Political Union. I recall that our party held a debate about female genital mutilation. Peter was somewhat famous if I recall correctly for his defense of it as a “cultural” practice. This was the nineties and moral relativism was all the rage. A lot of us women were very much in disagreement. What’s up with making brutality and torture okay? Great post Jill!