Should Israel’s military, including nuclear weapons, “disband itself? Does it become a shared, joint military force” of Arabs and Jews, asked Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) President Lara Friedman in a July 13 webinar. This question was only one element of the lunacy in her discussion with American Jewish political commentator Peter Beinart, who recently proposed to merge Israel with Palestinian communities in a binational, Arab-Jewish state.
Friedman moderated a harmonious conversation between Beinart and US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Director (USCPR) Yousef Munayyer. This Palestinian-American activist is so radical in his Israel-hatred that he has refused to recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization. Beinart effectively offered no rebuttal to Munayyer’s denunciation that Israel’s Jewish democratic “project is just not defensible.”
Munayyer demonized Zionism, past or present, in any territory, even though Zionist-Israeli development of the former Palestine Mandate territory has benefited a growing local Arab population throughout history. Zionism’s “century-long settler-colonial process” had a “disastrous impact on the indigenous population,” namely historically migrant Arabs with widely varied backgrounds who only adopted the name “Palestinian” in the 1960s. Because of demands including a fraudulent “right of return” for millions of Palestinian “refugees” to Israel, he declared that any proposed Arab-Palestinian state alongside Israel “has never been an adequate solution for” Palestinians.
Beinart made no objection to such an influx of Arabs indoctrinated to hate Israel that would demographically destroy the world’s only Jewish state. “Given how central memory and the notion of return is in our own history, it seems to me a terrible irony that we would deny another people their right to hold on to a memory” and “return to a historic home,” he stated. In reality, many Palestinians have expressed interest in finding a better home than under their corrupt rulers through immigration.
Although Beinart opposed abandoning Israel as a Jewish nation state as late as 2010, he has now joined in hackneyed equivalences of Israel with historically racist societies such as South Africa. “Equality is impossible in a state that privileges Jews over Palestinians,” he stated in a recent interview while discussing Israel’s Arab minority, which has full civic equality. To Friedman and Munayyer Beinart praised the radical, anti-Semitic Black Lives Matter movement as representing “equality and justice” while offering America’s civil rights struggles as a model for Israeli embrace of bi-nationalism. “Enlightened white Americans recognize that massive racial inequalities in the United States are a form of privilege that ultimately doesn’t serve the United States,” he stated.
Jerusalem Institute of Strategic Studies Vice President David M. Weinberg has rightly mocked Beinart for advocating a “kumbaya country,” which, among other things, ignores rampant Muslim Holocaust denial. Thus his original proposal in the leftist Jewish Currents, where he is an editor, closes with ludicrous speculation about future Jewish and Palestinian co-presidents jointly marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. Meanwhile this binational state would also build a Museum of the Nakba to propagate the Israeli-demonizing myth that Jews engaged in ethnic cleansing during Israel’s 1948 independence war. The museum would be in a Jerusalem suburb at the site of Deir Yassin, a former Arab village that gave rise to the Arab propaganda of an Israeli massacre during the war.
This “binational Disneyland,” as termed by the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) commentator Steve Frank, offers in Beinart’s view more security to Jews than a strong, modern Israel. Jews “are reluctant to give up on the power that the Jewish state provides” as an “antidote to the Holocaust,” he conceded in the webinar. He opposed that “Jews should be powerless” or not “think about our own collective and national self-interest,” but, vis-à-vis the Palestinians, “equality and justice may ultimately serve the cause of Jewish safety better than unjust power.”
In reality, FrontPage Magazine contributor Joseph Puder correctly noted that “Beinart seems to have deliberately overlooked Islam” and its violent, supremacist doctrines such as the jihad embraced by Palestinians. Israeli journalist Yisrael Medad has similarly chastised Beinart for ignoring Palestinian “cancerous dehumanization” of Jews. As Foundation for the Defense of Democracies President Clifford D. May has observed, “Palestinians have lost their jobs for inviting Israelis to join them for holidays, celebrations, or even a cup of coffee.”
The “energetic careerist” Beinart will most likely be even less successful in establishing a tolerant, Muslim-majority democracy among Palestinians than he did in supporting the American-led 2003 Iraq regime change. Any possible Palestinian state will be “what all other Arab states are, in some form or another: A homophobic, misogynistic Muslim majority tyranny,” Israel Institute for Strategic Studies Executive Director Martin Sherman has assessed. “Placing the safety of Israel’s Jewish population in the hands of a potentially hostile Muslim majority would be an invitation to possible genocide,” the pro-Israel legal authority Alan Dershowitz has bluntly concluded in response to Beinart.
By contrast, Beinart’s Jewish Currents article merely contains multicultural bromides that deny “something inherent in Arabness that makes democracy impossible.” “Palestinian freedom would undermine” supposedly the “core justification” of “regional antagonists like Iran and Hezbollah,” whose jihad against Israel has apparently nothing to do with cleansing Islamic lands from infidel Jewish rule. He expressed no skepticism towards the terrorism-supporting, Israel-hating Haaretz reporter Amira Hass, who claimed having experienced four years of “welcoming warmth” in Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Munayyer reciprocated Beinart by dismissing “orientalist, racist notions…that there is something innately violent or anti-Jewish about Palestinians or Arabs and Muslims more broadly.” “There is no reason to believe” such concerns, Munayyer claimed in complete ignorance of centuries-long Islamic antisemitism, “either by historic evidence in the region, or the rest of the world.” Echoing Beinart, Friedman also mentioned the “dehumanization of Palestinians in the Jewish world.”
Numerous observers such as Medad have thrashed Beinart’s “serpentine reasoning” and “shocking immorality.” While Munayyer questioned the proposition that “multi-ethnic states don’t work,” one JNS commentator contrasted the communal divisions that have wracked Czechoslovakia, Iraq, Lebanon, the Soviet Union, Sudan, Syria, and Yugoslavia. Linking Palestinian communities with Jordan, whose population is 70 percent Palestinian, is far more logical than Beinart’s “utopian experiment,” which would “likely prove catastrophic.”
Frank also scoffed at a mere “diverting thought experiment for Beinart and his fellow academicians on the Upper West Side.” As JNS editor Jonathan Tobin noted, for Jews such as Beinart, a “righteous American pilgrim,” Israel is a place of “intellectual tourism.” Puder compared the New York Times’ publishing Beinart’s views with its 2009 publication of late Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi’s proposal for an “Isratine” single state.
Accordingly, Beinart announced in the webinar that he is not depending persuasion to implement his plans, but rather “nonviolent pressure on Israel” such as United Nations or American aid sanctions. “There will be no movement in the direction of equality and justice unless Israel’s incentive structure changes and unless Israel pays a price,” he stated. While radical anti-Israel groups including If Not Now (INN) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have “inspired [him] by their activism,” he is not yet “signing up to the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] movement in toto.” However, it “has played an important role” in raising the issue of anti-Israel sanctions.
Such screeds against Israel negate Beinart’s pious wish not to equate Zionist Jews settling their ancestral homeland with imperial colonists. Jews have “deep roots” in Israel and are not the “equivalent of the British in Kenya,” he conceded in the webinar. Munayyer also hedged the ubiquitous “settler-colonial” slander of Israel by Palestinian advocates including himself, stating that he “would not doubt in any way the connection of Jewish people historically to the land.”
Beinart’s sophistries cannot conceal a “hack and professional anti-Israel activist” in the words of FrontPage Magazine contributor Daniel Greenfield, with troubling implications for American Jewry. The Pied Piper Beinart has achieved considerable prominence among Jews such as J Street U members, the college arm of the not-so-“pro-Israel,” leftist J Street, who have called themselves “Beinart’s Army.” His “appalling egotism” mirrors the “intellectual and moral bankruptcy of much of the liberal American Jewish establishment,” Tobin has correspondingly noted. Israel’s supporters should reject this “crisis of faith within much of American Jewry, whose loyalty to liberal patent nostrums exceeds their love of their fellow Jews.”
Dapto says
Beinhart would’ve been a cheer leader for the 3rd Reich and now he’s a cheerleader of the 4th Reich, and he like many other Jews would send all those who object to concentration camps for disposal, Zeig Heil Peter you Nazi.
mortimer says
Israel is already a ‘binational, Arab-Jewish state’. That is in its charter.
An Arab who swears allegiance to Israel enjoys the full rights of citizenship.
Charlie in NY says
Beinart needs to be asked only one question, “if your prediction of harmonious co-existence turns out to be wrong and the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states join in to attack a now effectively defenseless Jewish populace, what do you propose?”
gravenimage says
Damn good question, Charlie.
gravenimage says
Peter Beinart’s Israeli Suicide
……………..
This is the same vicious moron who lauded Obama for how he thought about terrorism. He was glad that Obama refused to consider ISIS a serious threat.
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459169728/the-atlantic-how-obama-thinks-about-terrorism
Unknown guy says
Is the oslo accords still applicable?