Something must have happened at the talk that prompted him to reverse his opinion on the propriety of his speech.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Elder of Ziyon|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Elder of ZiyonBy 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.
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.”
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Elder of ZiyonLet'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 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.”
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Elder of ZiyonThere 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.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Elder of ZiyonOn 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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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Elder of ZiyonThe 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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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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