Peter Beinart argues that the Left's antizionism is different from the Right's. It isn't. ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

Peter Beinart argues that the Left's antizionism is different from the Right's. It isn't.

Peter Beinart's latest piece in the New York Times makes the argument that right-wing anti-Zionism is genuinely antisemitic because it roots Israel's behavior in Jewish identity, while left-wing anti-Zionism is morally serious because it roots Israel's behavior in systems — colonialism, nationalism, and power. Tucker Carlson blames Israel's crimes on its Jewishness; progressives analyze structures. Therefore, Beinart suggests, the two are categorically different, and the progressive arguments are serious and fact-based.

The argument is superficially appealing, but it confuses vocabulary with logic. Both versions of anti-Zionism, right and left, turn out to depend on the same underlying premise: that Jews cannot be trusted to tell the truth — a conclusion the piece will earn, not assert.

The left's central accusations against Israel are claims about intent, not descriptions of behavior. Genocide requires the intent to destroy a people. Apartheid requires the intent to permanently dominate. Colonialism requires the intent to displace and replace. If your evidence for those accusations is based on reading minds, it is not evidence — unless there is no other credible explanation.

There is one, and it is more credible. The left's explanation — deliberate targeting, racial domination, eliminationist expansionism — requires attributing to Israel a set of intentions that Israel explicitly denies and that the historical and strategic evidence does not support. Israel's explanation fits the facts better: Israel is a Jewish state built by a people who internalized two thousand years of antisemitism as lived experience rather than historical abstraction, whose founding principle of Never Again functions as an operational imperative rather than an empty slogan, and whose moral framework derives from three thousand years of Jewish ethical thinking that the West itself largely inherited — and that the left applies selectively, inverting it against its source.

That last point matters more than it usually gets credit for. Israel is not a state indifferent to civilian casualties. It is a state whose entire military and legal culture is organized around minimizing them, because that is what its moral tradition demands. The IDF's doctrine of purity of arms, the military advocate general's office, the post-operation investigations, the evacuation warnings that forfeit tactical surprise — these are the institutional expression of a moral seriousness that runs through Jewish law on the conduct of war. And they are precisely why Hamas uses human shields. That strategy only works because Hamas correctly calculates that Israel will accept higher costs to its own soldiers rather than kill civilians indiscriminately. An army with genocidal intent does not generate that calculation in its enemies; it generates the opposite one.

What the left consistently refuses to recognize is that Israel is not choosing between war and peace. It is choosing between two moral costs: accept civilian casualties in Gaza while fighting an enemy that has made those casualties structurally unavoidable, or allow that enemy to terrorize Israeli civilians forever and with impunity. That is a genuine moral dilemma, the kind that three thousand years of Jewish ethical tradition was actually developed to navigate. The left's framework collapses it into a morality play with only one moral agent — Israel — and one set of lives that count. The moral cost of allowing Hamas to terrorize Israeli civilians indefinitely simply does not register as a cost. That omission is not an oversight; it is the premise.

This framing also resolves what the left's framework struggles to explain structurally. Israel is not a colonial project in any meaningful sense; it is the return of a people to their ancestral homeland, a homeland they never ceased to inhabit, mourn, or orient their prayers toward. It extends full citizenship to Arab Israelis, seats them on its Supreme Court, and elects them to its parliament, while maintaining Jewish survival as a founding priority — a priority that is entirely coherent given the history. And it allows thousands of trucks of aid into Gaza even while fighting there, because feeding civilians in a war zone is consistent with its own moral position. That last fact is almost never processed seriously by the left, because it is flatly inconsistent with the assumption of Israeli immorality that anchors their framework.

Which is where the epicycles begin. Arab judges on Israel's Supreme Court? Tokenism. LGBTQ rights? Pinkwashing — a deliberate propaganda strategy to distract from "apartheid." Evacuation warnings before strikes? Public relations. Aid convoys into Gaza? Cover for genocide. Nothing counts against the theory; everything gets absorbed into it, reclassified as deception, filed under further evidence that the malice runs deeper than it appears.

The pro-Israel explanation is consistent with the facts as they present themselves. The left's explanation is coherent only by reclassifying every inconvenient fact as performance. One framework has to keep adding mind-reading and assumptions of deception to survive contact with reality. The other doesn't. Which means there is no structural difference between the progressive position and a conspiracy theory.

I've written before about the difference between correspondence and coherence theories of truth, and how conspiracy theories are epistemologically indistinguishable from the coherence model. In a correspondence framework, claims are tested against reality, and evidence can falsify them. In a coherence framework, claims are judged by how well they fit the narrative, and contradictions are reinterpreted until the system stays intact. Conspiracy theories survive exactly this way: counterevidence doesn't weaken the theory, it proves how deep the conspiracy goes.

The contemporary left critique of Israel has adopted that structure. Israel isn't liberal — it's pretending to be. Its institutions aren't genuine — they're performative. Its justifications aren't honest — they're propaganda. The particular content of the accusation varies, but the underlying move is the same: nothing Israel or its supporters say or demonstrate can be taken at face value, because the deception is total. Which is exactly how antisemites have looked at Jews for centuries — deceptive, cunning, conspiratorial, pursuing a hidden agenda of power over non-Jews.

Beinart argues that the left avoids essentializing Jews because it speaks the language of systems rather than identity. But the left's systemic framework only remains coherent if it assumes, as a standing premise, that Jewish institutions are uniquely deceptive — that their visible behavior is systematically misleading and their explanations are not to be accepted at face value the way Hamas's claims are. Without that premise, the coherent narrative collapses, because counterevidence would have to be taken seriously and the theory would have to update.

Which brings us back to Tucker Carlson, whose theories Beinart correctly identifies as antisemitic conspiracy thinking. Carlson speaks openly about Jewish civilizational threat and hidden manipulation. The mechanism is recognizable: start with a fixed conclusion, interpret all evidence through that lens, reclassify contradiction as proof of how cunning the deception is.

Strip away the vocabulary, and the left's framework runs on the same engine. The right says Jews are dangerous because they intend to control the world; the left says Israel is dangerous because of its predetermined intentions to dominate its Arab neighbors and population. Both use the same logic and the same assumptions of Jewish evil. Only one of them is honest enough to say "Jews."

Beinart wants to draw a moral boundary, and there is one — only it falls in a different place than he draws it. The dividing line runs between those willing to test their claims against reality and those who build arguments that reality is not permitted to challenge. Cross that line and it no longer matters how sophisticated your language is or how carefully you avoid biological essentialism.

Beinart writes that "combating the anti-Israel right's conflation of Israel and Jewishness is made harder by pro-Israel American Jewish organizations that have conflated those two things as well." Yet Beinart's own argument depends on antisemitic tropes no less than Carlson's does — the assumption of Israeli Jewish intent to dominate and destroy, which is the complete opposite of how Jews and Israel understand themselves and their history. His framework requires that premise to function.

Whether he sees it or not, he is in the same epistemic territory as Tucker Carlson.