Beinart's apology is, ironically, the antithesis of humility

My last post on Peter Beinart's craven apology to his BDS comrades for speaking at Tel Aviv University was scathing, but it didn't examine his thought process. And a deeper examination reveals something that we all need to learn from.

Beinart is very smart. He knew about the BDSers' anger at his talk beforehand, and he went ahead and gave it anyway. So why would he defend his decision before the talk and then, afterwards, apologize for it? The BDSers who aren't accepting his apology have a point - if he really cares about their feelings, as his apology stated, then he was as aware of their objections before the talk as he was afterwards.

Something must have happened at the talk that prompted him to reverse his opinion on the propriety of his speech. 

Unfortunately, there is no video of the speech or the Q&A. But there is one detailed article about it as a blog at Times of Israel, by Alec Mauer.

Mauer says that Beinart was one of his childhood heroes. He shares Beinart's ideas of 15 years ago about the two state solution, of being against BDS. He is disappointed that Beinart's position today makes no sense to living, breathing Israelis - including the liberal ones who attend TAU or who make films. Beinart repeated BDS claims that they are not boycotting individuals but only institutions, and being at one such institution, he understands that this is a nonsensical distinction.

Based on his report, it appears that many of the students who attended were like him - people who are liberal, who want Palestinians to have a state and equal rights, but who actually live there. 

In other words, Beinart 2025 met Beinart 2010 - and couldn't win an argument with himself. He was confronted with people who share his stated goals but actually think about them realistically. And he failed to move them. 

In the past 15 years, while Beinart moved more and more to the anti-Israel Left, he came up with reasons that sounded reasonable to his new audience - but that made increasingly little sense to those on the Israeli Left who would be affected by his desired policies. He spoke to echo chambers of progressives in America who look at the world through the simplistic oppressor vs. oppressed lens and the feedback in that echo chamber prompted him to keep moving that way. 

One crucial point that is not often mentioned in these contexts: his livelihood became more and more dependent on his political positions. It is incredibly difficult to think independently when your income depends on thinking only one way. As progressive Americans moved more towards blatant antisemitism, Beinart had to work not to alienate them. 

His talk at TAU showed him that his progression from liberal Zionist to anti-Israel activist, which he pretends was a natural evolution, did not impress those who are exactly like he used to be. They knew his arguments and they wanted to hear him answer their questions about them. He couldn't do it. 

Before the talk, he believed the praise heaped on him by his followers, that his arguments are airtight, that he can convince any sincere liberal Zionist of the righteousness of his new positions by quoting Amnesty and B'Tselem. When he realized that he was not nearly as consistent or smart as he thought he was, he decided that going to TAU was a mistake. But he cannot admit he couldn't win the arguments.

Beinart didn't go to Israel for dialogue. He went to admonish the students. He went not as an intellectual but as a prophet. And the students would have none of that. 

A truly humble person would have listened to the students and admitted that he doesn't have the answers. A conceited person blames those who refuted him as being part of the evil enemy. 

Beinart's apology was not an act of contrition. It was an act of conceit to avoid admitting his hypocrisy. Usually apologies are signs of humility, but in this case, Beinart's apology was an act of self preservation. And the BDSers understand that. 

Humility is a necessary component of growth. Beinart's arrogance shows what happens when one believes that they are infallible - their own ethics go out the window to keep from admitting they are wrong. 

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It was inevitable, but @PeterBeinart has now outsourced his brain to BDS

Peter Beinart spoke at Tel Aviv University this week. Both Israel haters and Zionists criticized him for this, and he apologized to only one side.

But one aspect of his craven apology appears to be Beinart's first direct support for BDS against all Israeli institutions, not just "settlements" or "aspects of BDS"  as he had argued before.

By speaking earlier this week at Tel Aviv University, I made a serious mistake.

In the past, when formulating my views about Israel-Palestine, I’ve sought out Palestinian friends and interlocutors and listened carefully to their views. In this case, I did not.

I really wanted to speak to Israelis. In the US, I’ve cultivated conversations with Jews with whom I strongly disagree, both to listen and in hopes of changing their minds. Over the horrifying last two years, I’ve hoped for more conversations with Israelis, to explain why I believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and why I believe Jewish supremacy is fundamentally wrong. My motivation for giving the talk wasn’t financial; I didn’t receive an honorarium. I wanted to say certain things to an Israeli audience. Speaking at Tel Aviv University seemed to offer that chance.

I let my desire for that conversation override my solidarity with Palestinians, who in the face of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide have asked the world boycott Israeli institutions that are complicit in their oppression. As Noura Erakat and others have pointed out, there are ways for me to talk to Israelis without violating BDS guidelines and undermining a collective effort against oppression. I could have had the exchange I desired while respecting a non-violent movement based on human rights and international law. Had I listened more to Palestinians, I would have realized that earlier.

It’s embarrassing to admit such a serious mistake. I dearly wish I had not made this one, which has caused particular harm because international pressure is crucial to ensuring Palestinian freedom. This was a failure of judgment. I am sorry.

He sounds like an abused wife apologizing to her husband after being beaten.

And so the transformation from "Zionist critic of Israel" to "non-Zionist critic of Israel" to "BDS supporter" is complete. From now on, Beinart now takes all of his instructions on how to act, what to write, what to do, what to say and what to think  from the BDS movement. 

He has finally outsourced his brain to terrorist lovers like Noura Erekat, who must approve everything he does in the future. 

This is a role that Beinart now enthusiastically supports. He just wants to be loved by terrorists.  (His magazine, Jewish Currents, refuses to condemn Hamas for October 7.)

But that isn't enough! Even after his groveling apology, the haters weren't mollified. TOI writes:

His apology, however, drew more backlash from leading anti-Israel activists. Nerdeen Kiswani, a leading anti-Zionist organizer in New York City, posted on X, “Peter consistently disrespects communities he claims to support, particularly Palestinians, and then apologizes for it.”

Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada website, wrote, “It’s hard not to see this as anything other than an exercise in damage control, to restore his marketability following the overwhelming backlash to his informed, conscious, willful decision to violate a clear picket line.”

This is the BDS playbook. As soon as you give them an inch, they berate you even more to browbeat you into total submission. 

To the BDS crowd, Beinart isn't an articulate supporter of the Palestinian cause who should be applauded for telling Zionists they are wrong. He is just a Jew, and Jews are useless unless they act like dhimmis, begging for acceptance and protection from their Palestinian overlords and agreeing that Jews who think for themselves are just closet Zionists. 

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The flip side of consequentialism: A response to Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart criticizes the US strike on Iran's nuclear program in terms of the US not considering the long term consequences of its actions:

Let's say the US does set back the Iranian nuclear program by a long way, and Iran is just too afraid or too weak to really do much in response. So it's a success, right? But over what time frame? I mean you could have said that the US had a big success when it overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in the fifties, because he was going to nationalize oil industry and do things that America didn't like, and it might have been for years after that it looked like a good idea. But you were laying the groundwork for a politics in Iran that was ultimately going to lead decades later to the overthrow of a pro-American leader, and the emergence of a militant anti-American leadership. The point, is, when you do things, you produce political consequences that play out over long, long periods of time and you don't know what the long term consequences are going to be. 

I've mentioned a number of times that Beinart is a master propagandist, and this is yet another example of how he uses propaganda techniques brilliantly to promote a completely wrong and immoral anti-Israel and anti-American position. 

After all, he has a point: there could be very bad long term consequences of any action by the US, or Israel, that could be worse than short term gains. 

This actually is true of every decision we make, big or small, international or personal. Beinart gives examples of decisions in the Middle East that may have caused bad long term consequences. So, everything must be done with caution, and Beinart says that the US did not use the proper amount of caution.

There are three problems with his argument, and they are difficult to see without realizing that Beinart always frames his arguments to preclude serious disagreement.

The first one is simple: yes, sometimes the consequences are bad. And sometimes they are good. Israel decimating Hezbollah last year resulted in Hezbollah not raining down tens of thousands of missiles on Israel, today. That is a pretty good consequence! Similarly, Israel's destruction of Syria's clandestine nuclear program cannot be regarded as anything but a success. So consequentialism goes both ways, and there is no way for Beinart to know the long term consequences any more than anyone else - whether they would be good or bad. So should no one ever make any decision because we cannot know every possible consequence? That is absurd, but if we accept Beinart's logic, that is the result.

In the real world, you make the best decisions you can based on the information you have now. You don't stay paralyzed because you might make the wrong decision. Beinart knows this, but he doesn't want you to think about it. 

Secondly, Beinart describes possible downsides of military action. But he ignores, completely, not only the possible upsides or action, but the the potential negative consequences of inaction. Iran clearly was hiding a secret nuclear program that is only compatible with weaponization. No one can seriously doubt it. What are the consequences of a nation that is the world's biggest sponsor of terror, that funds terror groups worldwide, having a stockpile of nuclear weapons? Beinart frames his argument in terms of actions, not inactions, so the casual consumer of his ideas does not realize that Beinart is creating a straitjacket in his argument that does not allow the thinking outside the box that Beinart deliberately constructs.

The third problem is when Beinart says:

I think Jewish tradition, like most other moral traditions, has some version of the idea of “what goes around comes around.” In Hebrew, it’s, “midah k'neged midah.” 

Guess what? Jewish ethics is not consequentialist. In Jewish ethics, the top priority is preserving life, your own and your nation's before your enemies. Iran's actions that clearly point towards building a nuclear weapon, plus its genocidal rhetoric against Israel that goes back to 1979, all point to the fact that Iran intends to destroy Israel - either with nuclear weapons or by using the threat of nuclear weapons to attack with impunity without fear of, yes, consequences.. This is not morally acceptable under Jewish ethics. Beinart's argument here indicates that he does not give a damn about the survival of the Jewish state or the Jewish people who live there. 

So when Beinart tries to use a Jewish ethical argument that Iran's nuclear weapons program must not be attacked, he is not only being deceptive. He is tacitly supporting the idea that Israel should not have the right to defend itself.

And it is hard to think of something more immoral than that.

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Morally depraved @PeterBeinart's new phrase to sanitize terror attacks: "Armed resistance against civilians"

Peter Beinart went to Harvard Divinity School to promote his new book about how difficult it is to be Jewish while Israel tries to destroy its enemies.  His Judaism has very little to do with the Jewish scriptures.

His arguments and rhetoric are tired, even if they strike a chord among the ignorant. He says things like , "if you don't want people to fight you and kill Israelis...you have to deal with the roots of the problem, with the underlying grievances. " But he claims the grievances are the root of the problem when they are an excuse for the attacks. The root of the problem is Arab antisemitism and the honor/shame system that cannot deal with weak Jews having political power in their ancestral homeland. Because if you are looking for roots, you need to explain the Arab attacks on Jews before Zionism, the deadly attacks in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-39. "Grievances" do not explain why they beheaded little girls and murdered non-Zionist yeshiva students in Hebron before the State of Israel existed. 

But there is one phrase Beinart used three times during his talk, a clearly deliberate choice of words that proves how utterly depraved he has become.

 There was all kinds of Palestinian resistance before 1987, as after 1987. ...There's been Palestinian armed resistance against soldiers, and there's been Palestinian armed resistance against civilians. 

And that didn't start with Hamas. In fact, one of the reasons the Israeli government was actually fairly sympathetic to Hamas in the late 1980s when Hamas was created was they couldn't imagine anything worse than the PLO. They couldn't do anything worse than Fatah and leftist groups like the PFLP, because those groups had been involved in armed resistance, including armed resistance against civilians. 

....[P]eople in the Jewish community ...denounce Palestinian armed resistance against civilians, which I also oppose.

What the hell is "armed resistance against civilians"? Why can Beinart not say the words "terror" or "murder" or "jihad"? 

In the ideological circles Beinart travels in—campuses, NGO salons, anti-Zionist conferences—the word “resistance” is a badge of honor. It connotes nobility. To even say the phrase “armed resistance against civilians” is to launder mass murder through the language of moral defiance. It’s how you make terror respectable. It’s how you turn Hamas atrocities into "tragic outgrowths of oppression."

That’s why he uses the term. Because his fans - those who wave "Resistance by any means necessary" banners and endorse BDS alongside open Hamas sympathizers - want their support of anti-Jewish violence given moral cover. And Beinart provides it.

He offers the progressive Left a sanitized vocabulary of terror: one in which murdering Jews isn’t antisemitic, just the inevitable consequence of how Jews act. In his view, Hamas isn’t genocidal, just misunderstood. To get published in the New York Times and invited to speak at Harvard, Beinart needs to nod to the idea that targeting the innocent is not ideal, while at the very same time excusing those same attacks. 

Peter Beinart may claim to oppose killing civilians. But his language says otherwise. When you call terror “resistance,” you are not neutral. You are not moral. You are not Jewish in any meaningful sense of the word. You are a handmaiden to those who cheer when Jews are butchered.

Peter Beinart pretends to be against terror attacks, but his very deliberate phraseology shows that his opposition to attacking civilians comes with a wink to the type of people who will enthusiastically buy his book and use their quoting him as proof that they aren't antisemitic when they say that they support Hamas burning babies. 

(h/t Eitan Fischberger)

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Once again, @PeterBeinart in the @NYTimes supports those who violate Jewish rights on campus

Peter Beinart writes in the New York Times with an article originally titled "You Want to Protect Jewish Students? What About Jewish Student Protesters? and later "Trump Doesn’t Want to Protect All Jewish Students — Just Those on His Team."

You can already see where this is going:

On April 29, 2024, Tess Segal, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Florida, joined her fellow activists at a prominent plaza on campus calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and boycott academic institutions in Israel. Some protesters studied or played cards. Later they read obituaries of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip.

Then law enforcement moved in. And although Ms. Segal says she did not resist arrest, she was handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was held overnight.

....In an era in which students without U.S. citizenship are snatched off the street by federal agents, Ms. Segal’s punishment may seem comparatively mild. But her case contains a special irony. Ms. Segal is Jewish.

I didn't spend any time researching this specific case, but it is obvious from Beinart's description that Tess Segal was not arrested or discriminated against because of her Jewishness or her support for the Jewish state. On the contrary, she was part of a campus mob protesting against Jewish rights and to make an exception for academic freedom for Jewish Zionist students who may want to study in Israel or collaborate with their Israeli counterparts. 

Beinart can argue all he wants for free speech rights for anti-Zionists, but pretending that Jews are being targeted on campus for anti-Zionist speech and require special protection as Jewish Zionist students do is peak Beinart-style deception. 

His deceit extends to other examples in the article:

Since Oct. 7, at least four universities have temporarily suspended or placed on probation their chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace.

He doesn't mention that it was because they violated campus policies. Should Jewish students be allowed to violate policies because they are Jewish? Only if they agree with Beinart's anti-Zionist politics, it seems.

At a pro-Israel event at Rockland Community College at the State University of New York on Oct. 12, 2023, a Jewish student who briefly shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Jews for Palestine” was reportedly suspended for the rest of the academic year. 

This was an indoor event, a "Unity Gathering in Support of Israel," held while the kibbutzim were still smoldering. Most colleges recognize that disrupting an event is not free speech - it is a violation of the free speech rights of the organizers of the event.  In fact, many of the college suspensions of anti-Israel protesters are for that exact reason - there is no inherent right to disrupt normal activities on campus.

Beinart is claiming, in effect, that pro-Zionist Jews do not have the right to have their own events free from being interrupted, disrupted and shut down by protesters. He is against free speech when that speech goes against his hateful "principles."

In May 2024, a Jewish tenured professor in anthropology at Muhlenberg College said she was fired after she reposted an Instagram post that declared, in part: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable.” 

First of all, the post by Maura Finkelstein also said "Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist." She is directly saying that 90% of Jews - on campus or anywhere - should not have the same rights as anyone else and calling them fascists. Can anyone who attends her classes feel comfortable?

They don't. Beinart omits the other reason she was fired - because within a  week of October 7 she taught two classes of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas propaganda. In her own words, on October 12, "I had dedicated both of my classes to contextualizing the events unfolding in Gaza and giving my students space to ask questions. ...In our first meeting, the provost told me that several Title VI complaints had come to her through the college’s Title IX office; “Multiple students felt you created an unsafe atmosphere and that you have been targeting and harassing them.”

Beinart, skillfully posting half-truths and omitting context about college policies and the events he is describing, is pretending that Jewish students and faculty are being targeted when in most cases they were violating the rights of Jewish students whose opinions they disagree with. On campuses where free speech is supposedly a sacred right, Beinart is supporting those who want to quash it - in one direction.

His last example is even more absurd:

Even when protest has taken the form of Jewish religious observance, it often has been shut down. Last fall, when Jewish students opposing the war during the holiday of Sukkot built Gaza solidarity sukkahs, temporary boothlike structures in which Jews eat, learn and sleep during the holiday, at least eight universities forcibly dismantled them, or required the students to do so, or canceled approval for their construction. (The universities said that the groups were not allowed to erect structures on campus.)

 These groups obviously tried to use sukkahs as a way to get around existing regulations against building encampments or other structures by pretending that they are for a religious purpose.  They clearly weren't - none of the people who built them would ever build a sukkah for religious purposes. They pervert Judaism for politics, and Beinart pretends that they were just practicing their religion - much like those who blow shofars at any "Jewish anti-Zionist" occasion and pretend that this is a religious obligation. 

No one is saying that anti-Israel students, Jewish or not, do not have the right for protests and speech that do not violate campus policies. Beinart is claiming that anti-Zionists, uniquely, have the right to violate campus policies. 

This is not a defense of free speech. It is a demand for privileged speech – for one side only.

By selectively presenting facts, omitting crucial context, and portraying violators of others' rights as victims, Peter Beinart is not merely misleading. He is manufacturing antisemitic propaganda: turning those who seek to destroy Jewish communal life on campus into the new “Jewish victims.” And the New York Times eagerly provides him the platform, without even basic fact-checking.

It’s not just deception. It’s complicity.

 

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Peter Beinart's anti-Jewish Purim propaganda

Master propagandist Peter Beinart  has written a polemic in The Guardian, adapted from his most recent book, that can only be described as antisemitic.

He describes the Jews of the Purim story as being genocidal:

 The book of Esther doesn’t end with Haman’s death. It continues because although Haman is gone, his edict to kill the Jews remains. The king can’t reverse it. What he can do is empower Mordechai and his kinsmen to take matters into their own hands. Which they do. “The Jews struck at their enemies with the sword,” proclaims the book of Esther, “slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.” On the 13th day of the month of Adar, the Jews kill 75,000 people. They declare the 14th “a day of feasting and merrymaking”. With the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry. That’s the origin of Purim.

Purim isn’t only about the danger Gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them.

...My hope, this Purim, is that when Jews encounter the slaughter that concludes the Book of Esther, we shudder. And that from this revulsion comes a new dedication to ending the slaughter being committed in our name in the Gaza Strip.

Beinart admits that the Jews of Persia had no choice but to proactively attack those who wanted to wipe them out. The king cannot reverse the edict. What else could be done? Yet even so, Beinart wants to frame the Jews defending their lives as a genocidal attack. He doesn't use that word here but his comparison with Gaza and his separate embrace of the lie that Israel is guilty of genocide makes this clear.

The analogy between the Gaza war and the Purim battles is apt, for the opposite reason. Hamas' charter and Haman's edict were both to exterminate the Jews. In both cases the Jewish goal was to eradicate only those who will stop at nothing in their attempts to utterly destroy the Jewish community. That is not immoral - on the contrary, self defense against those who want to murder you is supremely moral. That is the Jewish perspective. The only genocides are the ones that Haman and Hamas planned. 

Beinart is upset that secular Jews aren't aware of the entire Purim story and gloss over the brief war mentioned in the Book of Esther. So am I. The war was justified and the killings as described in the story were justified as well. 

Peter Beinart is not the first person to accuse Jews of genocide in the Purim story. It is a staple of antisemites.  Beinart's perversion is to make this accusation while posing as a committed Jew.

Beinart will quote Jewish sources when they are convenient for him. He writes, as a Jew, "We have largely stopped wrestling with what our sacred texts say about Jewish ethical responsibility. " Yet this is what Beinart himself is doing - ignoring what the sacred texts say about Jewish self-defense. 

Beinart cherry-picks Jewish sensitivity to violence but ignores how tradition distinguishes between what is and is not allowed in battle. He knows quite well that the Hebrew Scriptures, Talmud and Jewish commentators are critical of misconduct and excesses in war and other violence. When Levi and Simeon slaughtered the residents of Shechem, they were criticized by Jacob and this was reiterated on his deathbed. The Jewish sages noted that God rebuked the angels for singing as the Egyptians drowned, with God saying, “My creations are drowning, and you sing?" 

Yet there is no such criticism of war against Amalek - except of Saul for not following Gods instructions to destroy them totally. The war in Esther was written as a clear analogy to the justified - and commanded - wars against Amalek, as Haman is regarded as a descendant of that people. Indeed, no classical Jewish commentary says a word against the destruction of the enemies of the Jews in Persia, and the sages were not reluctant to criticize actions that they felt were immoral. 

It isn't that Jews aren't sensitive to unnecessary deaths, as Beinart's libels imply. It is that there is a big difference between obligatory wars, such as those motivated by self defense, and wars that go beyond the necessity.  The battle in Persia was clear in its goals and its morality,  hence no criticism. 

Beinart pretends that he is more moral than the Jewish sages he himself claims that are a source of his ethical stance. Instead of understanding and learning from the sages, he arrogantly pretends to be more virtuous than they are. 

Worse, Beinart’s depiction of Jews ‘feasting with blood barely dry’ revives medieval blood libel imagery, a hallmark of antisemitic propaganda, while cloaking it in progressive critique.

And he has the nerve to promote his book with these antisemitic arguments while posing in front of the very sacred texts that he is throwing in the garbage.

Jews know quite well what the lessons of history are, thank you very much. Beinart's claim that Jews do not properly learn from their own traditions is nothing less than a sophisticated version of the antisemitic argument that the Jews should have learned more from the Holocaust. 

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Not only Arabs: "Progressives" cheer and justify Arabs treating Jews like garbage

Earlier today I wrote about how Arab media is celebrating Arabs in Qatar refusing to speak with Israeli reporters. 

I want to emphasize that Arabs have every right not to be interviewed by whomever they want, that isn't a human right. But the stories coming out of Qatar include Arabs kicking Israelis out of taxis and ganging up on/bullying (presumed) Israelis. That is what I am pointing out as a violation of Israeli human rights. (And let's be honest - lots of Arab Israelis came to Qatar and we haven't heard any issues with them.)

It turns out that it isn't only Arabs cheering and justifying Arabs ganging up on Jews.

Sarah Leah Whitson, formerly of Human Rights Watch and who now runs her own "human rights" organization, tweeted, "A good reminder that Israel's 'peace' with dictatorships (aka Abraham Accords) is not peace with the Arab people. And yeah, no justice, no peace."

Besides the idiocy of saying that Israel shouldn't make peace with dictatorships (who, exactly ,is eligible in the Arab world?) her "no justice, no peace" is a flippant way to justify treating Israeli Jewish professionals as subhuman. Which is a curious thing for a human rights expert to say.

Daoud Kuttab tweeted this justification for Arab antisemitism, heartily endorsed by Peter Beinart:

"Every action has a reaction?" Really? So Israel is justified in fighting back when Hamas shoots rockets? Israel can try to arrest those who kill Jews and try to hide in Area A? Please. Israel is never justified in protecting its citizens when Palestinian Arabs attack according to these masters of creating rules for Israel that do not apply to anyone else. You will never hear Kuttab or Beinart justify Israeli defensive moves to protect the lives of her citizens, saying "every action has a reaction." 

The hypocrisy is obvious to everyone except for those who aren't already stuck in the mire of hate towards Israel, where Arabs have no responsibility for their actions yet Israel must be compared to a "turn the other cheek" ideal that literally no other country is expected to come close to reaching.

These hypocrites - all of whom swear up and down they are not antisemitic - always somehow manage to find the one exception to their own stated moral codes. It's awful that gays want to visit the World Cup must stay in the closet, but Israeli Jews who visit should expect abuse.

It's their own fault - for being Israeli.

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The American Jewish Committee in the 1960s: Peter Beinart's NYT lies more egregious than I reported

I wrote my fisking of Peter Beinart's NYT op-ed quickly, but the true depth of Beinart's dishonesty can be seen from a deeper dive into one of the topics he mentioned and I touched upon.

He wrote, "Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”

Beinart links to a fairly obscure 1998 academic paper, "Transformation Through Crisis: The American Jewish Committee and the Six-Day War," by Lawrence Grossman, published in the journal American Jewish History. This is already a red flag - if American Jewish organizations in the 1960s  were so uniformly critical of Israeli democracy, wouldn't there be a New York Times article about it that Beinart could link to?

The entire point of the academic article Beinart links to is to show that the AJC was out of the mainstream of American Jewish opinion on Israel and Zionism before 1967. It refutes Beinart's point - but Beinart quotes a small portion and pretends that the AJC's ambivalence on Israel represented mainstream American Jewish thought.

On the contrary - that attitude made the AJC nearly irrelevant in the 1960s. The paper makes the AJC's anomalous status clear:

The Jewish community had shifted massively toward the Zionist pole, and the AJC risked being marginalized if it did not adjust.

By the early 1960s, writes Naomi Cohen, AJC "had virtually stopped growing." In 1962 Executive Vice President John Slawson told a newly organized AJC Committee on National Growth that one reason Jews were reluctant to join was that  "there is still a feeling that we are anti-Israel."

The article also notes that the AJC was literally the only Jewish organization in America to criticize Israel for  a 1966 retaliatory raid in Jordan after a series of Arab attacks and not to condemn a UN anti-Israel resolution on the issue.  The Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations, the major American Jewish umbrella group, condemned the UN resolution. The National Community Relations Council, the other large American Jewish umbrella group, was prevented from joining the Conference of Presidents resolution because its rules required a unanimous vote - and the objection of the AJC, which had only recently joined the NCRC, vetoed it.

Beinart must have read the entire piece to find the out-of-context quote he published, which means he knows very well that he was misrepresenting the opinions of major American organizations.

To be sure, American Jews in the 1960s had other issues to worry about besides Israel. There was still explicit antisemitism in America, and the plight of Soviet Jewry started gaining recognition. But I did a quick survey of the front page of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, as a representative of Jewish mainstream concerns, on its first issue in each year from 1960 to 1967. Israeli topics were featured as the top story in every issue (judged as the right-most story on the front page):

January 1, 1960: Golda Meir criticizes a World Bank loan to Nasser's Egypt

January 6, 1961: David Ben Gurion says a speech of his was distorted and he lauds US Jewry

January 5, 1962: Soviet-Egyptian pact on arms a concern for Israel

January 4, 1963: "Middle East arms race unfolding to Israel's disadvantage": Javits

January 3, 1964: Israel charges Syria with "barbarism" in treatment of Israeli prisoners

January 1, 1965: Cabinet decides against reopening Lavon affair

January 7, 1966: State Department confirms supplying Jordan with up to 100 Patton tanks

January 6, 1967: Israel complains to Security Council over Arab raids

Beinart is making things up, knowing full well that most people - and certainly the New York Times editorial board - will not fact-check him. This is a pattern with Beinart, who is not only lying, but attempting to rewrite history itself. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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08/27 Links: The Use Of Human Shields Is A War Crime. America Must Hold Terrorists Accountable; Why are Israelis so happy? Because Israel is small

From Ian:

The Use Of Human Shields Is A War Crime. America Must Hold Terrorists Accountable

The administration and Congress should take several steps to more effectively counter the widespread use of human shields by PIJ and other terrorist organizations.

First, the administration should implement its legal authority to designate terrorists who use human shields. Despite strong evidence of human shields use by PIJ and other terrorists, and the requirements of U.S. law, neither Trump nor Biden has thus far imposed any human shields sanctions on anyone. Imposing sanctions on PIJ leaders for their use of human shields would be an important first step.

Meanwhile, Congress should reauthorize and enhance the existing sanctions law,which is set to expire on December 31, 2023.

In addition, the US, Israel, and other allies should work together, including with NATO, to press the UN and other international organizations to investigate, condemn, and encourage penalties for human shields use by terrorist organizations and their material supporters. For example, the UN human rights high commissioner and council should be encouraged to vigorously investigate, condemn, and encourage accountability for the use of human shields.

Finally, the militaries of Israel, the United States and other NATO members, and other allies must coordinate in sharing best practices for more effectively addressing the use of human shields by terrorist organizations.

A robust U.S. government response to the use of human shields by PIJ and other terrorist groups would concretely advance several American national security and foreign policy objectives. These objectives include protecting U.S. and other NATO troops against terrorist use of human shields; setting the record straight in the face of UN and other efforts to falsely accuse Israel of committing war crimes; and undermining PIJ, Hamas, and other terrorist groups while supporting Palestinians who are prepared to make peace with Israel.

Jonathan Tobin: An end to the delusions about Biden, Iran and Israel?

Like any gambler who is willing to seize on any glimmer of hope that irresponsible betting will be rewarded with an unexpected reversal of fortune, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid was sounding hopeful this week. The Israeli government that he now leads spent the last year wagering the Jewish state’s security on the idea that better relations with the Biden administration and a decision to downplay differences would influence Washington to finally show some spine and stop appeasing Iran. So, it was hardly unexpected that Lapid would seize on the news that the United States had “hardened” its response to the latest Iranian counter-offer in the talks about renewing the 2015 nuclear deal.

The “good news” consisted of a report claiming that Lapid had been told by Washington that it would not give in to Iranian demands that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cease investigating Tehran’s nuclear program or take the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) off the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Shorn of context, that might be an encouraging development. But with the international media publishing multiple stories based on leaks from the administration about an agreement between the two sides being imminent, the notion that any victory on these two points, whether temporary or not, vindicates the decision Lapid’s tactics is risible.

Even taken in isolation, these points don’t mean that much.

As bad as giving in on that point would be, the IRGC issue is largely symbolic. If a new deal is reached, Iran’s terrorist arm will be immeasurably strengthened and enriched along with the rest of the regime, regardless of whether they’re on a U.S. list of terror groups. It’s also true that even if Iran doesn’t get Biden to agree to drop the involvement of the IAEA altogether, that means nothing. As the Iranians have demonstrated ever since former President Barack Obama’s signature foreign-policy achievement was put into force in 2015, violating they have no compunctions about repeatedly violating it, especially with regard to flouting the components requiring compliance with IAEA regulations.

More to the point, if these provisions and other points of equal importance are the only obstacles standing between an agreement, then Lapid knows his hopes of persuading the administration not to sign a new deal are negligible. As Lapid has recently reiterated, Israel’s position is that the United States and its partners in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are making a huge mistake. Mossad chief David Barnea has been adamant in insisting that the plan is a “strategic disaster” for Israel and based on “lies.”

‘Basmanny Justice’ and the Jews of Russia

Six months into the war in Ukraine, Russia is being Russia once again.

By that, I mean the predatory, bullying Russia that we know from history. The Russia that persecutes Jews and other minorities, whether under the tsars or the Bolsheviks. The Russia that sneers at freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the other precious individual rights that prevail in the democratic West, while pushing its own brand of nationalist, obscurantist ideology.

When it comes to the “Jewish Question,” as the Bolsheviks were fond of calling it, Russia’s hostility is eminently recognizable. For much of the Putin era, that reality has been obscured, as the Russian dictator actively promoted the impression of a benevolent disposition towards the country’s Jewish minority, assisted in this task by a number of Jewish influencers abroad who really should have known better. Yet as was predictable, with the first whiff of a geopolitical crisis, Jews have once again been cast in a villainous role.

In a recent interview with the Voice of America’s Russian-language service, Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet Jewish refusenik who served as head of the Jewish Agency from 2009 to 2018, observed that Russia is “almost completely isolated from the free world.” Like a wounded animal, it is lashing out at its adversaries as a result, trying to find and pressure any weak spots. Sharansky pointed to the example of Germany, where the coming winter is anticipated with dread given the German dependence on Russia’s heavily sanctioned energy sector.

“They are scaring Germany with the fact that people will start dying from the cold in winter,” said Sharansky.

In Israel, of course, the mild winters and the lack of dependency on Russian natural gas—earlier this year, the European Union even signed a deal to import Israeli and Egyptian natural gas as part of weaning the bloc off Russian supplies—mean that the regime in Moscow has to select a different pressure point. “In the same way, they are starting to put pressure on us, using the Jewish Agency,” emphasized Sharansky.

Russia’s campaign against the Jewish Agency, which assists Jews wishing to emigrate to Israel, was launched at the end of last month. The Russian ministry of justice filed a legal bid to close the agency’s local operations, alleging that a database of Russian citizens was being maintained in contravention of Russian law.

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Fisking Peter Beinart's propaganda, again

I have noted before that Peter Beinart is a master propagandist. He carefully frames his arguments in ways that sound reasonable unless you understand the facts as well as his methodology.

Today he writes in the New York Times that those who accuse Israel bashers of antisemitism are wrong.

Let's look at his arguments:

Over the past 18 months, America’s most prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews.

Last April, after Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of “the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” the American Jewish Committee claimed that the report’s arguments “sometimes border on antisemitism.” In January, after Amnesty International issued its own study alleging that Israel practiced apartheid, the Anti-Defamation League predicted that it “likely will lead to intensified antisemitism.” The A.J.C. and A.D.L. also published a statement with four other well-known American Jewish groups that didn’t just accuse the report of being biased and inaccurate, but also claimed that Amnesty’s report “fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on Earth.”

These examples are all accurate. It is almost absurd to argue that one-sided, lying accusations against Israel do not stoke antisemitism. But Beinart tries:

Defenders of repressive governments often try to discredit the human rights groups that criticize them. A month before the A.J.C. accused Human Rights Watch of flirting with antisemitism, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times accused it of being “anti-China.” In 2019 a spokesman for Iran accused Amnesty of being “biased” against that country. In this age of rising authoritarianism, it’s not surprising that human rights watchdogs face mounting attacks. What’s surprising is that America’s most influential Jewish groups are taking part.  

The fact that bad people sometimes do the same things as good people doesn't make good people bad. Beinart doesn't say this explicitly, of course, but he is trying to make the reader equate China's defenders with Israel's, which is unconscionable.

Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”  

This is deceptive on a number of levels.

The AJC had a history of being non-Zionist - sympathetic to Zionism but not explicitly supportive. Other American Jewish organizations, like the American Jewish Congress and the Zionist Organization of America, were more supportive.

By 1960, the AJC realized that the American Jewish community wanted a more Zionist message from them. They therefore decided to open up an office in Israel, but - as Beinart's link shows! - there was still an undercurrent of resentment at Israel starting to take center stage in world Jewry. The entire quote, which Beinart knows most people won't look up, says:

This was not a mainstream American Jewish attitude, as Beinart pretends. American Jews were heavily Zionist in this timeframe - after all, this was the time of Leon Uris' and Paul Newman's book and movie Exodus. He is lying, knowing the NYT won't call him on it.

This began to change after the 1967 war. Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip made it master over roughly a million stateless Palestinians, which fueled anger at the Jewish state from leftists in the United States and around the world. At the same time, assimilation was leading many progressive American Jews to exit organized Jewish life, which left Jewish groups with a more conservative base as they searched for a new agenda now that civil rights for Black Americans had become law.

The result was an ideological transformation. In 1974, two A.D.L. leaders wrote a book arguing that Jews were increasingly menaced by a “new antisemitism,” directed not against individual Jews but against the Jewish state. Almost a half-century later, that premise now dominates mainstream organized American Jewish life.

The term "new antisemitism" started in the 1960s, before the Six Day War, as Soviet antisemitism that hid as anti-Zionism became mainstream. The book Beinart references also talks about Arab antisemitism, which is undeniable - and therefore ignored by Leftists like Beinart. In other words, the new antisemitism is quite real and well documented, and not a made-up concept from conservative Jewish Americans like Beinart implies. 

But NYT readers would believe Beinart's alternate history.

Largely as a result of lobbying by Jewish organizations, the American government has embraced the proposition, too. The State Department now employs a definition of antisemitism whose examples include opposing Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. This year the Senate confirmed Deborah Lipstadt — a historian best known for fighting Holocaust denial — to be the Biden administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. Ms. Lipstadt has said that Israel’s “continued holding of the West Bank is problematic,” but when asked at her confirmation hearing about Amnesty’s report accusing Israel of apartheid, Ms. Lipstadt claimed that the report’s language was “part of a larger effort to delegitimize the Jewish state” and thus “poisons the atmosphere, particularly for Jewish students” on college campuses. In 2018 several Palestinian members of the Knesset tried to introduce legislation that would grant Palestinians equal citizenship rather than what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls “Jewish supremacy.” According to America’s most prominent Jewish organizations and the U.S. government, this kind of call for equal citizenship constituted bigotry.  

No. Saying that the Jewish people have no right to self determination is bigotry. Saying that the Jewish state has no right to exist is bigotry.  No one says that Arab Israelis (not "Palestinians") demanding equal rights is bigotry. That is more Beinart doubletalk.

Now that any challenge to Jewish statehood is met with charges of bigotry against Jews, prominent American Jewish organizations and their allies in the U.S. government have made the fight against antisemitism into a vehicle not for defending human rights but for denying them. Most Palestinians exist as second-class citizens in Israel proper or as stateless noncitizens in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 or live beyond Israel’s borders because they or their descendants were expelled or fled and were not permitted to return.

Israeli Arab citizens are not second class citizens, although discrimination still exists like it does everywhere else. And Palestinian non-citizens are not...citizens. They can make peace with Israel tomorrow and create their own state. The only reason they haven't is because they do not accept the Jewish state's very existence - which is, indeed, antisemitism.

And make no mistake - the unanimous support for Mahmoud Abbas' Holocaust trivialization this past week shows that Palestinian anti-Zionism is just a cover for old fashioned Jew-hate. Which is another topic Beinart doesn't want his readers to know about.

But the campaign against antisemitism is being deployed to justify not merely the violation of Palestinian human rights. As relations have warmed between Israel and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, American officials have begun using the struggle against antisemitism to shield those regimes from human rights pressure, too. In June, Ms. Lipstadt met the Saudi ambassador in Washington and celebrated “our shared objectives of overcoming intolerance and hate.” From there she flew to Saudi Arabia, where she met its minister of Islamic affairs and affirmed, once again, “our shared goals of promoting tolerance and combating hate.” In the United Arab Emirates she sat down with the country’s foreign minister, whom she declared a “sincere partner in our shared goals of” — you guessed it — “promoting tolerance and fighting hate.”

This is nonsense. According to a report this year by Freedom House, a human rights think tank funded largely by the U.S. government, Saudi Arabia is more repressive than Iran. The United Arab Emirates is more repressive than Russia. And although Ms. Lipstadt declared that her visits to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi left her “heartened by changes underway in parts of the Middle East,” both countries, according to Freedom House, are more oppressive than they were in 2017. Less than two months after she lauded the Saudi monarchy’s tolerance, it sentenced a member of the country’s persecuted Shiite minority to 34 years in prison for Twitter activity critical of the government.

When it comes to their own disenfranchised populations, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are as intolerant as ever. 

Again, Beinart is hiding the truth. No one is supporting Saudi or Emirati human rights violations, and to claim that Zionists do is nothing short of slander. His main lie is that last sentence - that they are as intolerant as ever. 

The fact that there is a rabbi in Saudi Arabia and synagogues in the UAE prove that the truth is the opposite. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for all their many faults - and not to minimize those faults - have changed course dramatically in recent years as far as tolerance goes.

And Israel is accelerating their slow march towards a more Western-oriented position, where human rights is a factor in their decision making.

Are they free societies? Not at all. But to disparage their positive changes is not a pro-human rights position. 

Beinart's premise is wrong, his examples are cherry-picked and deceptive, and his framing and methodology is nothing less than that of the best antisemitic propagandists in history.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Palestinian officials and media unanimously support Abbas' antisemitism

After Mahmoud Abbas yet again spouted antisemitic lies in Germany on Tuesday, Palestinian officials and pundits unanimously supported him. 

Bassam al-Salihi, head of the People's Party and PLO Executive Committee member,  wrote that Abbas' statement that Israel committed fifty "holocausts" against Palestinians was true. "President Abbas' statements express the position of all the Palestinians, and the unrelenting Israeli incitement against the Palestinian president is totally and completely rejected," he wrote on his Facebook page.

Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement also supported his statement. Fatah spokesman Munther al-Hayek said that Abbas' words were meant "to remind the world of the suffering of the Palestinian people and the massacres committed by Israel." If there is to be any apology, al-Hayek said, it should be to the Palestinian people "whose land was occupied and the most heinous crimes were committed in front of the eyes and ears of the world without the killer being held accountable."

Ma'an News Agency reported Abbas' statements as "bold" and dismissed criticism by Israel as "hysteria."

The editor of Amad strongly defended Abbas' antisemitism, saying that "the patriot must stand without hesitation, conditionality, or thinking in the battle to defend President Abbas’s words, and that they represent what every Palestinian inside and outside the homeland believes… It is a political moment that never accepts neutrality. Silence on the fascist entity's war against the content of President Abbas's words is a partnership in it..there is no consolation for the cowards and the trembling."

Wattan.net even went beyond Abbas' words, with a Jew-hating screed that said that Israel is guilty of far more than 50 "holocausts." By insisting that the Holocaust is a unique event, the editorial says, Jews believe that their lives are worth more than anyone else's. "The Zionist extremist voices that have become addicted to blackmailing the world are nothing but a follow-up to the idea of ​​ethnic or religious discrimination linked to the illusion and myth of 'God’s Chosen People'  attributed to a racist god, and a real estate and land dealer who is intolerant of a part of his creation, which does not fit the description of the Creator."

I could not find one condemnation of Abbas' words in Palestinian media. 

For his part, Abbas' fake apology was an excuse to insult Israel again. He didn't apologize at all, but merely said that he "condemned the Holocaust in the strongest terms," which is as low a bar as one can imagine. 

But Abbas then attacked Israel, and implied that what Israel does is worse than the Holocaust, saying, "the crimes and massacres committed against the Palestinian people since the Nakba at the hands of the Israeli forces... have not stopped to this day." Meaning, the Holocaust ended in the 1940s but Palestinian suffering has lasted for over seven decades. (This theme has been used often in Palestinian media.)

Among the anti-Israel activists I follow on social media, I could not find one condemning Abbas' words besides J-Street. This includes the self-described experts on antisemitism who follow he Middle East extensively like Linda Sarsour, Rashida Tlaib, Marc Lamont Hill, and Peter Beinart. Because to them, if antisemitism doesn't come from a white nationalist, it isn't antisemitism. 

Their silence condones Abbas.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Andy Levin's Views On Israel Matched The Israel-Haters He Looked To For Support (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Representative Andy Levin's defeat in the Democratic primaries has brought out his defenders, who staunchly defend his Jewish bonafides.

Like Mehdi Hassan, for example:

Because nothing establishes the unassailability of your position on Israel like being a synagogue president.

Sheesh, indeed.

If you do a search on Twitter, it seems that everyone knows that Levin was a synagogue president, and thinks it actually means something. Twitter doesn't track how many tweets come up, but in a Google search, over 9,500 hits come up.

More dishonest is Hassan's deft little twist that the opposition to Levin must be based on his support for Palestinian human rights -- a nice touch.

Peter Beinart certainly agrees:

Left unsaid is the fact that Jewish opposition to Levin was not about his support for Palestinian human rights.

Israel-supporters were more concerned with backing for the rights of Israelis in their homeland.

After all, Levin is the one who introduced the H.R.5344 - Two-State Solution Act, which if passed would have established (among other things):

o  It is the policy of the United States that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza are occupied territories and should be referred to as such consistently in official United States policies, communications, and documents.

o...the United States should maintain diplomatic relations with the Palestinians, including by reopening a United States consulate in Jerusalem and allowing for the reopening of the Palestine Liberation Organization foreign mission in the District of Columbia. [emphasis added]

So according to Andy Levin -- the Congressman and former synagogue president -- Jerusalem should once again be a divided city.

And according to Levin's bill, the Western Wall belongs to the Palestinian Arabs.

But the problem with Levin's stand goes beyond his wanting to undo Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem.

On November 18, 2019, Secretary of State Pompeo announced a change in US policy on Israeli settlements:

After carefully studying all sides of the legal debate, this administration agrees with President Reagan: the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not, per se, inconsistent with international law.

On November 21, Levin responded with a letter he initiated, signed by such Israel-haters as Betty McCollum, Ilhan Omar, Mark Pocan, Rashida Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal, Henry Johnson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others.

A copy of Levin's letter, with the signatures, is available online.

Pompeo wasted no time in responding and rebutting Levin's claims, writing:

I am in receipt of your letter of November 21 in which you criticize the State Department’s determination that the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not categorically inconsistent with international law - a decision which you contend reverses “decades of bipartisan US policy on Israeli settlements.” You further argue. in conclusory fashion, that this determination “blatantly disregards Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

While I appreciate your interest in this important issue, I could not disagree more with those two foolish positions. [emphasis added]

In response to Levin's claim that "the State Department's decision to reverse decades of bipartisan U.S. policy on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank," Pompeo wrote:

First, the State Department’s determination did not reverse any policy with regard to Israeli settlements. Rather, the State Department reversed a legal determination by Secretary Kerry made during the waning days of the Obama Administration, that the establishment of settlements was categorically inconsistent with international law. That determination was made in a failed attempt to justify the Obama Administration’s betrayal of Israel in allowing UNSCR 2334 — whose foundation was the purported illegality of the settlements and which referred to them as “a flagrant violation” of international law — to pass the Security Council on December 23, 2016. [emphasis added]

In response to Levin's claim that the US policy on settlements, as reflected in UN Resolution 2334 had bipartisan support, Pompeo reminded him:

Secretary Kerry’s determination did not enjoy bipartisan consensus. Rather, it received bipartisan condemnation, including from leading Democrats in both chambers of Congress. Indeed, an overwhelming number of Senators and House Members, on both sides of the aisle, supported resolutions objecting to the passage of UNSCR 2334. 

...No less a Democratic spokesman than the Senate Minority Leader [Schumer] publicly stated at his AIPAC address on March 5, 2018, that “it’s sure not the settlements that are the blockage to peace.” [emphasis added]

Levin goes so far as to challenge Pompeo on The Geneva Convention, "This State Department decision blatantly disregards Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which affirms that any occupying power shall not 'deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.'" -- which Levin apparently is taking literally, as if the Israeli government was actually transferring Israelis to these areas, a claim Pompeo rebuts with a reference to Eugene Rostow, former Dean of the Yale Law School and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs during the Johnson Administration. He was responsible for the draft of UNSCR 242, a foundation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Pompeo quotes Rostow, who stated in 1983 that “Israel has an unassailable legal right to establish settlements in the West Bank.”

Former Ambassador David Friedman writes in his book, Sledgehammer:

I was deeply grateful that 106 members of the House, led by Congressman Andy Levin of Michigan, wrote to Pompeo to condemn his decision. Without that letter, the record supporting the decision might have been incomplete insofar as some members of the Legal Department at State were reluctant  participants.. But the letter created a platform for a more fulsome response. [p. 165]

Hassan, Beinart and other defenders of Levin will of course continue to attempt to muddy the waters on the reaction against Levin's attempt to impose his leftwing politics on Israel.

But the fact remains that Andy Levin no more represented support of the Democratic Party for Israel than did the Israel-haters he found it convenient to ally himself with.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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