Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Peter Beinart

Showing posts with label Peter Beinart. Show all posts

Thursday, February 28, 2019

Peter Beinart's insulting and offensive defense of anti-Zionism as not antisemitic (update)

In The Forward (where else?), Peter Beinart offers a defense of anti-Zionism, saying that it is wrong to associate it with antisemitism. "Anti-Zionism is not inherently anti-Semitic — and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase the Palestinian experience," he claims.

The entire article is an attempt to thread the needle to find boundary cases where it might theoretically be possible to be against Israel but love Jews, or vice versa. Look at Satmar! What about antisemite Richard Spencer who calls himself a "White Zionist"?

The article is sickening and offensive. To understand why, let's imagine a similar article about racism in America.

It is possible that someone might want to hang a Confederate flag without being racist. It is possible that a black man who is habitually stopped by white police officers was a victim of honest mistakes every time. It is possible that gerrymandering election districts around neighborhoods primarily of one race has nothing to do with racism. It is possible that white people who don't want black people in their neighborhoods are only concerned with property values. Hell, it is possible that some plantation owners in the South loved their slaves and treated them as members of the family!

Peter Beinart is the Confederate flag defender of Judaism.

Does knowing that there is a possibility that the offensive acts being done might be innocent make black people feel any better? No, all of those arguments, in the aggregate, are disgusting justifications for racism. And the victims know this very well, despite the theoretical arguments..

When the UN has an obsession with slamming Israel more than any other nation, sure it is possible that it has nothing to do with Jews. When professional academic organizations choose to boycott Israel and only Israel, sure it is possible that they all coincidentally believe that the Jewish state is their highest human rights priority. When artists play in China and Russia and Lebanon without a peep from anyone, but receive death threats for wanting to play in Israel, sure it might be an oversight. And when BDS activists say that everyone should boycott only Jewish bands from Israel and not Arab bands from Israel, or that Jewish owned businesses in Judea and Samaria should be sanctioned but not those owned by Israeli Arabs, or that only Jewish Israelis who move across the Green Line are considered "settlers" but not Israeli Arabs, I suppose maybe someone can come up with some reason why that isn't antisemitic.

But in the aggregate, it is obvious what the reality is. There are only two possible reasons to explain the obsessiveness that so many have towards Israel - either it is the worst human rights violator on the planet, or the attackers are acting on their latent Jew-hatred and justifying it, just like any bigot justifies their behavior as being righteous.

Israel is not the worst human rights violator in the planet. It isn't in the bottom hundred.

Jews who identify with Judaism, in general, know in their gut that these obsessive attacks on Israel are fueled by Jew-hatred, just as blacks know when they are being targeted that there is an underlying racism that can explain the many, many examples of discrimination theyexperience. This is true no matter how many Beinart-types try to show that each individual act might be looked at, if you squint hard enough, as being innocent.

Beinart only allows that a small number of anti-Zionists are antisemitic, like Farrakhan or David Duke. This is also an insult. Anyone who would want to minimize racism would be rightly questioned as to his or her true agenda, and when Peter Beinart wants to minimize left-wing antisemitism he should be questioned as well - why do you believe that Jews should shut up about their feeling attacked, consistently, daily, in the media under the guise of "anti-Zionism"? Other kinds of bigotry are amplified by the Left and the benefit of the doubt is given to the victims.

Unless the victims are Jews.

Is 100% of anti-Zionism antisemitic? Maybe not. But 98% is, and pretending that the 2% is the majority is unconscionable and ultimately an apologia for today's brand of Jew-hatred.

The obsessive attacks on Israel are indicative of a much bigger problem, and that problem isn't that Israel deserves to be attacked way out of proportion to any real or imagined crimes it has done. The problem is exactly antisemitism pretending to be mere anti-Zionism - an antisemitism that can be loudly and proudly defended thanks to people like Peter Beinart who can provide a Jewish cover for the underlying hate that animates it.

UPDATE:

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If Peter Beinart is so smart, why is it so easy to point out his lies?

Peter Beinart shows off his 1990s-era thinking in the Forward, which is eager to publish him. Essentially every paragraph betrays his bias, his inability to grasp reality, and his wishful thinking:

Since the 1970s, and certainly since Bill Clinton got Yitzhak Rabin and Yaser Arafat to shake hands on the White House lawn at the beginning of the Oslo Peace Process in 1993, every American president has practiced “dealism.” Every one has dreamed primarily of solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and being remembered as one of history’s great peacemakers.

None has dreamed primarily of being remembered as one of history’s great liberators.

None has described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict primarily as a struggle for rights.

This stands in contrast to the way in which Americans, at least in retrospect, view other conflicts that pitted a population lacking basic freedoms against the state that denied them. Americans don’t generally tell the story of Mahatma Ghandi and Kwame Nkrumah’s struggles against British colonialism, or Martin Luther King’s struggle against white supremacy, or Nelson Mandela’s struggle against apartheid, or the American colonists struggle against “taxation without representation,” as a tale of how the two sides “got to yes.”

The Palestinians aren't the Founding Father or Ghandi or Martin Luther King. They have a autonomous state which is recognized by most countries in the world, a state that has failed - not because of Israel but because their leaders are not interested in building a state, or in securing rights, or in freedom. If they had wanted those things - things that Beinart believes axiomatically they want - they would have a state now. They would have accepted one of the many peace plans that Israel agreed to. They would have actually rescinded support for terror, which Arafat promised to do back in 1993. Beinart still believes Arafat's lies and he still pretends that the Intifada never happened.

Why?

Why does Beinart not ever want to discuss their failures and pretend that only Israel is to blame?

This isn't analysis - it is pathology.

Palestinian Arabs do have rights. So do Israelis - the right not to be stabbed, blown up, run over and to live in peace in the Jewish state. That is a right that Peter Beinart doesn't talk about.

Lacking even the minimal moral scaffolding of previous administrations, Trump and Kushner have taken what seems like the shortest path to a deal: They have demanded that the weaker party cave on virtually everything.

Although the details remain hazy, reporting suggests that the Trump peace plan will not create a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, will not link Gaza and the West Bank, will not require Israeli troops to leave the Jordan Valley (which comprises roughly 25% of the West Bank), will not require Israel to evacuate settlements and will not allow a single Palestinian refugee to return home.

Any how, exactly, is the "right of return" a prerequisite to Palestinian rights to live in a state of their own? How exactly are the 1967 lines a prerequisite to peace? How is their capital being in Jerusalem a prerequisite to peace and their acquisition of actual human rights - the types of human rights that are actually codified somewhere, not what they claim they are?

The Trump administration is cutting out the bull that Palestinians have been claiming for years, lies that Beinart swallows whole. If they want a state they can have one. But their desire for Jerusalem or "return" or the 1967 lines has nothing to do with freedom and rights - every one of those are designed to ensure that their state is not an endgame but a waystation on the way to the ultimate destruction of Israel, as every poll and every map and every honest interview with Palestinians shows.

But the idiot Beinarts and Kerrys and Obamas of the world refuse to believe it. (I think Clinton gets it, because he saw the rejectionism firsthand.)

In late August, the White House announced it was cutting $200 million in aid to the Palestinians. Then it ended funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). UNRWA mostly provides health and education for Palestinian refugees, some of the poorest and most desperate people on earth. It serves half the people of Gaza, who already live in a territory the UN says may be uninhabitable by 2020.

As a result of Trump’s budget cuts, UNRWA warns that it may soon close more than 700 schools.

Do I have to point out to Beinart that if UNRWA would cut out all Jordanian citizens from its welfare, its budget would be reduced by 40% and there would be no crisis? And that the evil Trump and Kushner want to give Jordan the money directly to educate and provide healthcare to their own citizens, as they should? Or does he pretend that 2 million Jordanian citizens deserve special attention and for the world to fund them, forever - or until Israel is destroyed by "return" which is the very basis of UNRWA's reason for existence and what it teaches in its schools?

Beinart isn't stupid. He knows everything I am writing is true. The question is why he prefers to write these lies that his liberal friends love to pretend are the truth, rather than to actually have the guts and admit that his thinking will not result in peace but in perpetual war. Why does he pretend that Israel is to blame for the failure of Oslo? Why does he not mention terrorism or rockets or Hamas or "pay to slay" or Abbas' rejection of peace plans and frameworks and even direct talks?

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Peter Beinart is an apologist for terror

Peter Beinart tries to snow his readers in his latest piece for the Forward. See if you can spot his sleight of hand as he describes Israeli political reaction to the New York Times publishing an op-ed by Marwan Barghouti:

[Michael Oren believes] because Barghouti was convicted of terrorism, his cause is illegitimate, even monstrous. The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t only explain why Marwan Barghouti isn’t Nelson Mandela. It explains why Nelson Mandela isn’t Nelson Mandela either.

A decade earlier, when the Oslo Peace Process began, [Barghouti] had declared the era of military resistance over. “The armed struggle,” he claimed in 1994, “is no longer an option for us.”
...
Barghouti’s shift, which led him to play an active role in the second intifada, constituted a tragic mistake, even a crime, against both Palestinians and Israelis. I’m not justifying it. But he’s not the only national leader to have embraced armed struggle after losing faith in non-violence. Mandela did too.

Beinart, whose parents were born in South Africa, knows very well that the analogy doesn't hold water - so he tells half-truths to create it.

Mandela was imprisoned in 1964 for sabotage against South Africa's power grid and plotting to overthrow the government. No one was injured, let alone killed, by his actions.

Yes, he supported violence against the state. Yes, sometimes ANC violence killed civilians. But Mandela was not a murderer and the ANC that he led never claimed to target civilians.

Barghouti, on the other hand, has been convicted of five murders - and more.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs summed up Barghouti's record:

Barghouti was convicted in a criminal suit in Israeli district court on five separate counts of murder of innocent civilians.
· Crimes orchestrated by Barghouti include: The murder of Greek monk Tsibouktsakis Germanus in Jerusalem on June 12, 2001; the murder of Yoela Hen in Jeruslaem on January 15, 2002; and the murder of Eli Dahan, Yosef Habi, and Salim Barakat in Tel Aviv on March 5, 2002.
· He was acquitted of 21 counts of murder in 33 other attacks, due to lack of sufficient evidence.
· Barghouti was the founder and senior official of the designated terrorist group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which was responsible for massacring dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings and shooting attacks during the Second Intifada (2001-2005).
· Barghouti also served as the head of the Tanzim, an armed faction in Fatah that carried out attacks on Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada.
· During his trials, Barghouti showed no remorse for the murders he committed.

There is a big difference between the two.

Furthermore, the New York Times, knowing Barghouti was a murderer, didn't let that influence its decision to publish his accusations against Israel (of torturing him, for example) as if they were factual. He clearly lied about prison conditions and about Israel arresting 800,000 Palestinians since 1967.

Why should a murderer be believed to write the truth in any venue, let alone in the pages of the major US newspaper?

Moreover, Mandela clearly changed from his support for violence when he became a political leader. Barghouti is not a leader and has not showed any remorse for his murders.

Beinart's article is actually far worse. He knows that despite Mandela's history of supporting violence, he is viewed nowadays (rightly or wrongly) as a near-saint. And Beinart's intent is to make the reader feel the same way about Barghouti that most Westerners feel about Mandela. See how Beinart ends his article as he pretends that his sickening argument has gone full circle:

“I was called a terrorist yesterday,” Mandela once said, “but when I came out of jail, many people embraced me, including my enemies, and that is what I normally tell other people who say those who are struggling for liberation in their country are terrorists.”

Do you hear that, Michael Oren? He’s talking to you.

There is no other way to read this than to say that Peter Beinart is trying to whitewash the actions of a terrorist who is responsible for the murders of many people, directly and indirectly.

Despite his halfhearted caveats and perverted downplaying of Barghouti's murderous terror as "a tragic mistake" - as if his victims died in car accidents - this essay shows that Peter Beinart is an apologist for terror.

(h/t EBoZ)

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How could modern Orthodoxy have produced Peter Beinart?

Last week, Peter Beinart in The Forward asked why God forced Jews to endure slavery in Egypt and gave one answer based on a modern Haggadah commentary that most Jews never heard of, that it was meant:

to sensitize the People of Israel to the suffering of others, to teach them what it means to be alienated and oppressed, so that when they set up their own society, they will be sure not to impose such suffering on others.”

Slavery, in other words, was meant to ensure that Jews would remember powerlessness once they gained power. Jared Kushner is what happens when that memory fails.

Rae Kushner was the daughter of a furrier in the Belarusian town of Navahrudak. The Nazis murdered her mother, her elder sister and her younger brother. She survived, with her father and younger sister, by climbing through a tunnel out of the ghetto and then living in the forest for a year.

Jared Kushner, her grandson, has lived a very different life. He attended Harvard after his father gave the university $2.5 million; he bought a newspaper company when he was 25, and now he advises his father-in-law, the president.

Their lives illustrate the revolution in Jewish fortunes that has occurred over the past 75 years. In remarkable ways, modern Jewish history echoes the passage from powerlessness to power that begins in the Book of Exodus. Therefore, the challenge for Jared Kushner, and everyone in our extraordinarily privileged generation, is to remember our ancestors’ suffering and honor their memories by defending the weak, vulnerable and oppressed today.

How could Kushner — a Modern Orthodox golden boy — fail to internalize that? How could he invite Donald Trump’s Cabinet to his house for Shabbat dinner only hours after his father-in-law’s executive order banning refugees from entering the United States? How could he pose in a tuxedo alongside his wife, Ivanka Trump, on Saturday night as that executive order wreaked havoc on innocent people’s lives simply because they hailed from the wrong countries?

Kushner’s failure is not his problem alone; it should chill every Modern Orthodox educator, rabbi and parent in the United States. How could the Modern Orthodox community, a community that prides itself on instilling in its children Jewish knowledge and ideals, have failed so profoundly?

This little essay of Beinart's fails on multiple levels.

It is exactly because of Shabbat that the Kushners had no idea of the firestorm that Trump's executive order engendered last Saturday - one that is hugely out of proportion to the actual contents of the executive order Trump signed that was fully aligned with his campaign promises.

Moreover, the Kushners have not sought to be the poster children of modern Orthodoxy.

Furthermore, it is a family's responsibility to support each other. To expect Jared and Ivanka to speak out against their own family is the height of chutzpa.

But the part of this essay that bothers me the most is that Beinart, characteristically, takes a very small section of what being Jewish is about and magnifies it out of proportion to reality.

Being Jewish is not synonymous with "tikkun olam," "repairing the world." That is the view of people who are more liberal than they are Jewish.

Jews are more than a nation - we are a family. And families, like nations, prioritize each other over others.

I read an article over Shabbat by an immigrant to Israel and how she routinely gives rides to hitchhikers, as well as how she allows her daughters (under some conditions) to hitchhike themselves. This is because most Jews in Israel act like family, not only like mere citizens. They'll start loud arguments with strangers because they know that the other party is not likely to pull out a gun. They grieve as one when there is an attack and celebrate as one when there is a victory.

Families take care of each other before they take care of the rest of the world - and taking care of the rest of the world cannot happen at the expense of taking care of your own people. The same applies to how nations treat their own people and people who want to join.

When the Torah tells the Jew to love the stranger, it is not referring to the entire world. It is referring to the "ger" - in some cases, people who convert to Judaism, and in other cases people who choose to live in the Land of Israel as part of a social contract that they accept the basic laws of society.

It is reasonable to argue as to how much this applies to a sovereign nation and its immigration policies. A policy of unlimited immigration is national suicide; but a policy of no immigration allowed for anyone is cold-hearted. Any reasonable person knows that the correct policy is somewhere in between. And Judaism - real Judaism, not Beinart's faux liberalism-as-Judaism - says that allowing immigration is a two-way street; there are obligations on both the sovereign nation and on the would-be immigrant, for the latter must accept the social mores and laws of the society that they want to join.

That is the moral starting point for any discussion, let alone a discussion based on Jewish sensibilities.

Peter Beinart is not basing his critique on the Kushners on anything that Judaism has to say. He is twisting Judaism to fit his outrage over Donald Trump and at the same time throwing the Kushners - his supposed family - under the bus, in his zeal to show the world how damned moral he is.

So the question isn't how modern Orthodox Judaism could have produced Kushner, It is how modern Orthodoxy could have produced such a hateful, self righteous prig as Peter Beinart.

I wonder if the teachers and principals at Peter Beinart's Jewish schools are proud of him today as the leading critic of the Jewish state and the self-appointed smug arbiter of morality, or if his hateful writings in Haaretz and The Forward and appearances on CNN fill them with pain and embarrassment for being the product of their schools and environment?

UPDATE: Beinart belongs to a modern Orthodox shul and identifies with its community but does not define himself that way and grew up Conservative.

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Peter Beinart says Ramallah is "inside the State of Israel".

Peter Beinart is so upset over David Friedman that he feels that he must counter Friedman's rhetoric with his own peculiar brand of "facts."

Friedman writes, quite accurately, that Palestinians in the West Bank "have freedom of speech, the right to free enterprise, the right to worship freely, the right to elect their leaders.”

Beinart's response:

Palestinians in the West Bank live inside the state of Israel. The Israeli army—and the army of no other country—can enter any square inch of the West Bank any time it chooses and arrest anyone it wants, including officials of the Palestinian Authority. Thus, the real “leaders” of West Bank Palestinians are the leaders of Israel. But West Bank Palestinians cannot elect them because they cannot vote in Israeli elections. As non-citizens, West Bank Palestinians live under military law. This dramatically restricts their freedom of speech, worship and their right to pursue free enterprise. Under Military Order 101, for instance, West Bank Palestinians need Israeli military permission to hold a political gathering of more than ten people, even if it is occurring in a private home.

So, according to Beinart, Palestinians live "inside the state of Israel." Not under occupation, not in any autonomous areas, but "inside the state of Israel." I guess if you are going to claim that Israel is an apartheid state, you have to start making up lies to support that claim.

Let's look at this awful Military Order 101. When was it written?

In August 1967.

Before, of course, the Palestinian Authority had control of Area A and partial control of Area B. Where some 97% of Palestinians live. And where Military Order 101 - and the other thousand of them - do not apply.

Beinart is claiming, absurdly, that this parade by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades two years ago in Qalandia was approved by some Israeli military officer.

And so was this speech by the PA prime minister last week.

And so is the weekly Palestinian Authority cabinet meeting.

And so is the lighting of the Bethlehem Christmas tree, which includes anti-Israel rhetoric every year.

And so was the Fatah Conference last month with hundreds of attendees.

And every ceremony where they name a new school or square after a terrorist.

And so is every other of the hundreds of gatherings that take place every month in the PA-controlled areas.

Beinart believes that Israel controls and approves every one of those gatherings, many of which are explicitly anti-Israel. Because they all take place "inside the State of Israel," in Beinart's absurd view.

Beinart's attempt to refute Friedman relies on absolute falsehoods.

But what can you expect?

Maybe Beinart will next claim that Argentina is part of the State of Israel as well. After all, the brutal, apartheid Israeli regime had kidnapped, arrested, tried and executed someone from that country in 1960.

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Why Peter Beinart is Wrong (again and again...)

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote an excellent essay for Newsweek where he stated that "Anti-Zionism is the new Anti-Semitism:"

What then is anti-Semitism? It is not a coherent set of beliefs but a set of contradictions. Before the Holocaust, Jews were hated because they were poor and because they were rich; because they were communists and because they were capitalists; because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they clung tenaciously to ancient religious beliefs and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.

Anti-semitism is a virus that survives by mutating. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, Israel. Anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism.

The legitimization has also changed. Throughout history, when people have sought to justify anti-Semitism, they have done so by recourse to the highest source of authority available within the culture. In the Middle Ages, it was religion. In post-Enlightenment Europe it was science. Today it is human rights. It is why Israel—the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East with a free press and independent judiciary—is regularly accused of the five crimes against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide. This is the blood libel of our time.

Anti-Semitism is a classic example of what anthropologist René Girard sees as the primal form of human violence: scapegoating. When bad things happen to a group, its members can ask two different questions: “What did we do wrong?” or “Who did this to us?” The entire fate of the group will depend on which it chooses.

If it asks, “What did we do wrong?” it has begun the self-criticism essential to a free society. If it asks, “Who did this to us?” it has defined itself as a victim. It will then seek a scapegoat to blame for all its problems. Classically this has been the Jews.

Today the argument goes like this. After the Holocaust, every right-thinking human being must be opposed to Nazism. Palestinians are the new Jews. The Jews are the new Nazis. Israel is the new crime against humanity. Therefore every right thinking person must be opposed to the state of Israel, and since every Jew is a Zionist, we must oppose the Jews. This argument is wholly wrong. It was Jews not Israelis who were murdered in terrorist attacks in Toulouse, Paris, Brussels and Copenhagen.

Peter Beinart in Haaretz feels he must defend anti-Zionists, especially Palestinian anti-Zionists, as being wholly separate from classical antisemitism.

It’s an elegant formulation. But there’s a problem. The claim that medieval Jews deserved blame for the murder of Christ, or that nineteenth century Jews were genetically inferior, had no rational basis. To believe it, you had to be an anti-Semite. It’s not irrational, however, to believe that Israel is seriously abusing Palestinian human rights. Anti-Semites may exploit those abuses to vilify Jews. But you don’t have to be anti-Semite to find them profoundly troubling.

In Beinart's twisted mind, the difference between classical antisemitism and today's anti-Zionism is that the old antisemitism had no "rational basis," giving as examples accusations of deicide and racism. But that implies that Beinart would not consider other accusations against Jews that had a germ of truth in them to be antisemitic. Therefore, Beinart's logic would imply, saying that Jews should be hated because they control the banks and Hollywood and the media is not antisemitism, because there is a rational basis for believing it - at least as much of a rational basis for hating Israel because that country is supposedly guilty of genocide and apartheid.

Sacks is saying that antisemites choose to blame Jews because they need a scapegoat. Is there really any difference between that way of thinking and demonizing Israel?

Sacks dismisses Israeli human rights abuses in one phrase: Israel is “the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East with a free press and independent judiciary.” But in the West Bank, Israel is none of those things. The vast majority of people in the West Bank are Palestinians who cannot vote for the state that controls their lives. They are not citizens of the country in which they live. Their Jewish neighbors enjoy a free press and an independent judiciary. But West Bank Palestinians live under military law, which, among other things, forbids ten or more of them from gathering for a political purpose without prior approval from the Israeli military, even if they gather in someone’s home.

No one is saying that life is wonderful in the West Bank for Palestinians (although it compares quite well to life in most of the Arab world.) But the point is that the hysterical accusations of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing is just as irrational as accusing Jews of drinking Christian children's blood.

Beinart cannot admit that quite obvious fact.

In his essay, Sacks only mentions the word “Palestinians” once. But it’s impossible to understand contemporary anti-Zionism without them. Palestinians didn’t become anti-Zionists because they needed a rationale for hating Jews and found the old ones outdated. They become anti-Zionists because their experience with Zionism was extremely rough.

Time for Beinart to twist history for his own purposes:

In the early twentieth century, Palestinians constituted the vast majority of people in British mandatory Palestine. Like colonized peoples around the world, they began developing a national consciousness and a national movement aimed at securing their independence. As Jews began migrating to Palestine in large numbers, the Zionist movement—which sought a Jewish state—became an obstacle to their national desires.

That is exactly backwards. Zionism predates Palestinian nationalism by any measure. Most Palestinians became "nationalists" as a means to destroy Jewish self-determination, not as a positive movement. I've proven that in this blog numerous times, but you only have to look at how the Arab nationalists in Palestine wanted to be part of Syria until Sykes-Picot ruined that plan - only then did the idea of Palestinian Arab nationalism gain any currency, and it was wholly meant as a means to frustrate Jewish nationalism.

Beinart is purposefully reversing history.

Yes, Palestinian nationalists made mistakes (for instance, their rejection of the 1947 partition plan) and committed crimes (for instance, the 1929 Hebron massacre). But you don’t have to consider Palestinians blameless to understand why they might view Zionism in a negative light.

The people who massacred Jews in 1929 (and 1921 and 1936-9) were nationalists? Oh, please. They were purely antisemites, and their actions prove Rabbi Sacks' point perfectly. Their "anti-Zionism" was a thin smokescreen for their hate of Jews, and if you look at any contemporaneous newspapers and books from the era, the antisemitism was explicit and pervasive.

Yes, some anti-Zionists are anti-Semites. And yes, of course, some Palestinian anti-Zionists are anti-Semites. But equating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism means claiming that virtually all Palestinians are anti-Semites, even Palestinians like Knesset Member Ayman Oudeh, whose political party, Hadash, includes Jews, or intellectuals like Ahmad Khalidi and commentators like Rula Jebreal, who have Jewish spouses.

Beinart stoops so low as to use the "some of my best friends are Jewish" line to defend rabid anti-Zionists.

Anyway, it means no such thing. While it is true that most Palestinians really are antisemites - there are things called "polls," you know - Rabbi Sacks is speaking about how people who want to hate Jews nowadays use anti-Zionism as their excuse, just as they historically used anti-capitalism or anti-communism or eugenics theories as excuses in the past. Either way, it is hate. But Sacks is not claiming that everyone who has a problem with Israeli policies is an antisemite. That is Beinart's straw man that underlies this essay, and its logical conclusion is disgusting:

Equating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism turns Palestinians into Amalekites. By denying that they might have any reason besides bigotry to dislike Zionism, it denies their historical experience and turns them into mere vessels for Jew-hatred. Thus, it does to Palestinians what anti-Semitism does to Jews. It dehumanizes them.

After purposefully misstating Rabbis Sacks' arguments, Beinart all but calls him a racist. (This is after praising him in the first couple of paragraphs.)

In truth, most Palestinians really are antisemites. Many are not. But that is not what Rabbi Sacks is saying. His point is that the arguments that are used against Zionism - not criticism of Zionism but the desire to destroy Israel - are virtually always prompted by antisemitic tendencies.

Beinart's desire to justify his own criticism of Israel makes him want to defend the indefensible. This essay is Beinart's attempt to conflate legitimate criticism of Israel with blind hate for Israel that is behind BDS and "Zionism is racism" and "From the river to the sea..." And the only way he can succeed is by lying.

One has to wonder why Beinart, who claims to be only against the "occupation," tries so hard to legitimize those who want to see Israel destroyed.

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Peter Beinart tries, and fails, to smear AIPAC

Peter Beinart in Haaretz notes that most American Jewish organizations are sympathetic to the Syrian refugee crisis, but that AIPAC is silent.

Why Is AIPAC Silent on Syrian Refugees?
Many American Jewish groups balance the Holocaust’s tribal and universal lessons. The most powerful one doesn’t even try.

...While the organizations that petitioned Congress on behalf of Syrian refugees respond to both halves of the Holocaust analogy, they don’t wield much power in Washington. They’re far less influential than AIPAC, which focuses only on the first. AIPAC leaders invoke the Holocaust constantly, but only to imply that Israel’s enemies are Nazis, never to suggest that non-Jews suffering oppression deserve help. That’s why AIPAC won’t weigh in on Syrian refugees.

Hate to break it to you, Peter, but AIPAC doesn't define itself as a Jewish organization. It's mission statement is concise and clear: "The mission of AIPAC is to strengthen, protect and promote the U.S.-Israel relationship in ways that enhance the security of Israel and the United States."

AIPAC was not founded to give statements on gun control or Medicare or abortion or Syrian refugees.

Except, of course, when mention of those refugees could help Israel. So for example, in a case that Beinart probably considers "Syrian-washing," AIPAC proudly reported that Israel was helping hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in Jordan through IsraAID.

Or, for example, back in 2012 AIPAC wrote with sympathy for the refugees as i discussed the ramifications towards Israel's neighbors of accepting so many refugees. It even discussed the possibility of jihadists hiding among those refugees. It is an issue that might affect Israel so AIPAC discussed it, as it should.

So AIPAC is not ignoring the issue - AIPAC only deals with it the way it deals with all issues, through the prism of the Israel-American relationship. Nothng nefarious, as Beinart wants you to believe.

Beinart is no dope. He knows what I am writing is true. But he wants to separate the American Jewish public from AIPAC, which he considers evil. So he trots out the straw man that AIPAC is a major Jewish organization that is too immoral to issue a statement of support for Syrian refugees.

Peter Beinart wants to impose his own bizarre opinions about Israel to the US government, and AIPAC is in his way. So he creates scenarios to smear AIPAC. His articles about Syrian refugees are smokescreens for his pushing his political agenda - whether it is anti-AIPAC or anti-Republican.

Beinart's pretense of concern over the Syrian refugee crisis is a sham. Itiis an excuse to bash those groups he finds objectionable no matter what they do. Based on the articles I linked to from AIPAC about the issue, AIPAC is using the issue when it fits their mission, just like Beinart is using the issue to fit his mission. Only AIPAC's mission is cheering Israel's accomplishments, and Beinart's mission is to tell the world how terrible Israel is.

This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 11 years and over 22,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

.@JeffreyGoldberg vs. @PeterBeinart on @jstreetdotorg

Last night there was a very cogent tweet by Jeffrey Goldberg that upset Peter Beinart:

There are two options. If Goldberg is correct, then J-Street calling themselves "pro-Israel" is an absurdity - you cannot be pro-Israel when almost all Israelis disagree.

If Beinart is correct, then I can say with more certainty that I am pro-Palestinian.

After all, according to Beinart, it is up to individuals to define whether they are pro- or anti-something, and objective reality is not relevant.

I support the right of Palestinian Arabs to live in peace and security in any Arab country without discrimination. I support equal rights for Arab citizens of Israel. I support helping the economy of the territories. I am very opposed to Arab discrimination against Palestinians. I condemn how Lebanon and Egypt and Jordan and Gulf countries treat Palestinians as second class citizens.

Therefore, I am pro-Palestinian, by Peter Beinart's definition..

And my pro-Palestinian credentials actually outweigh J-Street's pro-Israel credentials, because I have lots of examples of Palestinians who (among themselves) agree with everything I just wrote, while J-Street will have to dig around the extreme Left of Israeli politics to find those who agree with them concerning Iran.

The fundamental question is whether being "pro-" something is objective or self-defining.

By objective standards, J-Street cannot claim to be pro-Israel if actual Israelis who have to live with the consequences of J-Streets positions consistently disagree with them group.

By Peter Beinart's standards, if someone wants to claim to be pro-Israel then they are. Presto!

Fact-check: Michael Oren vs. Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart has joined the chorus of hysterical voices slamming Michael Oren for his recent interviews and book.

Beinart says that it is Oren, not President Obama, who is naive.

Let's fact-check Beinart:

Let’s start with a few quotes from Oren’s recent media blitz. In a recent interview at New York’s 92nd Street Y, Oren declared that American Jews must oppose an Iran deal that “everybody in the Knesset agrees is emphatically bad.”

Everybody? Thirteen of the Knesset’s 120 seats are held by Palestinian citizens of Israel (often called “Arab Israelis” by American and Israeli Jews). Earlier this year, they were elected on a platform calling “for nuclear disarmament in the Middle East, including Israel.”

These Palestinian Knesset members, in other words, don’t think Obama’s nuclear diplomacy is too soft on Iran. They think it’s too soft on Israel, whose hundreds of nuclear weapons they consider as grave a threat to regional peace as Iran’s nuclear program. With a single phrase, Oren makes them disappear.

If the 13 Arab Knesset members are against nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, how does Beinart conclude that they support a deal which from all indications will give Iran a path to nuclear weapons?

I don't know if Oren's statement is 100% true, but Beinart has no proof for his dismissal of it, and his supposed proof is knowingly deceptive since it doesn't prove anything one way or the other.

Let’s take another example. In an interview with the Jewish Journal’s Shmuel Rosner, Oren recently called Israel “one of the few democracies in the world that have never known a second of non-democratic governance.” This statement makes sense only if Palestinians didn't exist. If they do, then Israel’s Palestinian citizens lived under military law until 1966. And to this day, millions of West Bank Palestinians live under Israeli control but lack citizenship and the right to vote for the government that dominates their existence. In other words, they’ve been living under “non-democratic governance” every second of their lives.

It is true that Arabs in Israel were under military rule until 1966. It is also true that they could vote. So while there was discrimination, it was still democracy.

No state in the world allows non-citizens to vote. If Israel is not a democracy, then neither is the US, where millions of actual citizens cannot vote.

Oren is correct, Beinart is wrong.

But these factual errors only hint at Oren’s true detachment. His deepest naivete stems from his assumption that Israel can maintain the status quo indefinitely because Palestinians will submit indefinitely to their lack of basic rights.

Beinart does not give a source for this statement. Certainly nothing in Oren's book even hinted at this. Beinart is wrong.

Oren rests this contention on two assumptions. The first is that Palestinians don’t have it so bad. In the West Bank, he wrote in February, “More than 90% of the Palestinian population enjoys de facto sovereignty. Israeli soldiers don’t patrol the major Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Jericho and Bethlehem, and are largely absent from other towns.”

De facto sovereignty? West Bank Palestinians live as permanent non-citizens under military law. The government of Israel – a government for which they cannot vote – controls the air space above them, the borders around them and the natural resources below. They are crammed into an archipelago of cities and towns, which cannot expand because Israel controls virtually all the land in between, land it doles out to settlers who, unlike Palestinians, enjoy full citizenship rights.

What makes sovereignty? There are different definitions. Wikipedia lists four:

domestic sovereignty – actual control over a state exercised by an authority organized within this state,[6]

interdependence sovereignty – actual control of movement across state's borders, assuming the borders exist,[6]

international legal sovereignty – formal recognition by other sovereign states,[6]

Westphalian sovereignty – lack of other authority over state than the domestic authority (examples of such other authorities could be a non-domestic church, a non-domestic political organization, or any other external agent).[6]

The PA fits under three of these definitions. Hamas has three as well, although a different set. Beinart's assertions that control of airspace, for example, is a prerequisite to sovereignty is fiction.

Oren is right, Beinart is wrong.

The second assumption is that Palestinians will submit because if they don’t, Israel will respond with overwhelming force.

Beinart again does not give a quote where Oren says this, and again Oren says no such thing in his book or interviews. Beinart is making it up.

For Netanyahu and Oren, this is what passes for realism: Pretend that Palestinians will be happy living under occupation, and bludgeon into submission those who aren’t. It’s the same kind of “realism” that people throughout history have used to justify denying others basic rights. And it rests on the contention that the oppressed will accept forms of servitude that we never would, either because their aspirations are lower or because their spirits can be more easily crushed.

Again, fiction. However, it is notable that Mahmoud Abbas has said explicitly that Palestinians don't have such bad lives:

" I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements," he said. "Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life."

Beinart claims that Oren is naive, but it si Beinart who is proven in this article alone not only to be naive but knowingly deceptive and even a liar.

Peter Beinart says BDSers hear "the voice of Sinai"

Assuming that this Mondoweiss account of a program at the 92nd St Y is accurate:

At the end of the discussion, [Peter] Beinart challenged the hall filled with 500 mostly older folks (and surely almost all Jews, and paying $40 a head) to include anti-Zionists at the table:

“And the last thing I’ll say and this is the most challenging I think maybe for most people, including for me: Our tent, our Jewish community, our proverbial Seder table, is going to have to include the Jewish kids who are not Zionists, including the Jewish kids who are involved in the BDS movement. Because Jewish kids are overrepresented in the BDS movement. You may find that frightening beyond belief, you may find it terrifying. And I understand why you do, but it’s true.”

Beinart then related an anecdote of a campus meeting of Students for Justice for Palestine where most of the group was Jewish, and continued:

“Every generation hears the voice of Sinai anew. This generation– one way it is hearing it makes us radically uncomfortable. We cannot afford to tell them that they are not welcome in Jewish spaces, because then we alienate them not only from Israel but from being Jews as well. We need to welcome them in, we need to argue with them, we need to challenge them, we need to be challenged by them. We may be entering– I take no pleasure in this, I find it a terrifying reality– We are entering, An era in which there is no longer going to be a Zionist consensus in the U.S. Especially if Israel continues on its current path. We will have to remain a Jewish community in that environment and we will have to be welcoming even to those people on the far left or the far right whose views we find deeply, deeply upsetting.”

Saying that those who are dedicated to destroying the Jewish state are listening to the word of God is beyond obscene..Beinart has lost what little credibility he may have had.

Beyond that, as usual, Beinart is wrong. He claims that by excluding these anti-Israel voices from the Jewish community, we are alienating them from Judaism. He has it exactly backwards - the vast, vast majority of Jews who support BDS are those who have already been estranged from Judaism, and they cynically use their accident of birth to legitimize a fundamentally anti-Jewish position.

Yes, Judaism is Zionist. You cannot meaningfully say "Next Year in Jerusalem" at the "proverbial seder table" while saying that Jews don't have rights to their capital city.

The seder happens to be a perfect way to illustrate how wrong Beinart is. Here is a part of something called "No time to Celebrate - Jews Remember the Nakba Passover Haggadah Supplement, 5768 / 2008":

Yes, they have changed "Next year in Jerusalem" to refer to those who want to see Jerusalem to be ethnically cleansed of Jews. Yeah, let's include them in the "big tent."

These people don't care about Judaism except for how to use it as a weapon. Their claim to Judaism, by doing things like hijacking the idea of a Passover seder, is like Hamas pretending to love human rights - a cynical ploy to fool others, but not a true statement of belief. Their "Judaism" - which is really taking concepts like "social justice" and calling it Judaism - is purely political, and their intent in being taken seriously by the Jewish establishment is to destroy Jewish (and mainstream Zionist) institutions from within.

Not to say that there isn't a problem with young people.. Beinart exaggerates it - there is far more pro-Israel sentiment among college students than he pretends - but there is a problem, and the problem is that too many people don't raise their kids to feel like they are part of the Jewish people.

The sad fact is that most American Jews know little about Judaism and Israel. The issue needs to be addressed early on, with dynamic education programs that start when the kids are young, with camps and trips and accurate education about Judaism and Zionism.

If the older people listening to Beinart are concerned about their grandkids, they should be putting their money into education for pre-teens and teens as well as into programs that counter the anti-Israel lies on college campuses.

The Haggadah - the real one, that is - has explicit instructions on how to deal with "the wicked son." We are not told to love him and listen respectfully to his views. On the contrary, we are told to recognize his true intention to weaken us and to publicly shame him for his efforts to hurt his people under the pretense of simply asking innocent questions., Judaism - real Judaism, that is - does not say to have a "big tent" to accept all viewpoints as having equal validity. It tells usto recognize evil and to fight it.

Jews who support BDS certainly are analogous to the wicked son. And Peter Beinart, by praising those who want to pervert Judaism in order to destroy Israel, may very well have crossed the line to that category as well.

J-Street speaker calls for destruction of Israel - to applause (update)

Here is Marcia Freedman, in a J-Street panel discussion on Liberal Zionism and sitting next to Peter Beinart, describing how she believes that the Jewish people should not have a state, and that instead they should live as a minority in an Arab Palestine as a "protected minority" - in other words, as dhimmis. I kept all the context (although I accidentally cut out the applause at the end:)

The entire session is here; her section begins at 1:02:45.

The moderator didn't challenge her, and as far as I could tell neither did any other panelists.

Isn't it interesting that at a conference that claims to be "pro-Israel, pro-peace" and that hammers away at how it wants a two state solution, there is no objection to this one-state solution where Jews are "protected" by people who want to kill them?

J-Street refuses to let Alan Dershowitz, an advocate of a two-state solution since the 1970s, speak. But this crazy lady who thinks that Israel treats Arab citizens worse than Arabs would treat Jews is given a platform, without a single dissenting voice that I could find, either at the session or on Twitter afterwards, from J-Street members or attendees..

In fact, J-Street U tweeted her remarks seemingly admiringly:

Marcia Freedman believes that the idea that a jewish homeland requires a Jewish majority needs to be examined more closely. #JSt2015
— J Street U Carleton (@CarlJStreetU) March 22, 2015

I am reminded of a series of tweets a few days ago by a BDS supporter and anti-Zionist who said that J-Street was her "gateway drug" to hating Israel:

J-Street has an open tent policy for people who want Israel to disappear, and spends most of its time attacking Jews who passionately love Israel.

Worse than that is that despite its avowed purpose, the organization cannot and does not defend Israel's existence against its critics - instead, it gives its critics a platform where they can spout their hate unopposed.

My test for whether people are really "pro-Israel" stands, and J-Street has flunked.

This is not exactly pro-Israel, or pro-peace.

UPDATE: Freedman's opinions are not anathema to J-Street, despite that organization's press releases. She is a member of their advisory council! (h/t nursemedic)

Ha'aretz' Peter Beinart argues that a nuclear bomb exploding in Israel is really not that bad

"Bibi is much more dangerous than
a couple of nuclear bombs"

There is plenty to fisk in Peter Beinart's Ha'aretz article criticizing Elie Wiesel for defending Netanyahu's upcoming speech to Congress. But for today, let's look at only one aspect.

Last week, The New York Times and Washington Post ran an open letter by Wiesel supporting Benjamin Netanyahu’s forthcoming speech to Congress. In it, Wiesel makes two assertions, neither of which he makes any effort to prove. The first is that the United States and Iran are on the verge of “a terrible deal.” What makes the deal, which has not even been struck, “terrible?” Wiesel doesn’t say.

The second is that a nuclear Iran would likely mean “‘the annihilation and destruction’ of Israel.” This, too, requires evidence that Wiesel does not provide. After all, Benny Gantz, who just retired as Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, has argued that while an Iranian nuke would be dangerous, “The Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people.”

One of his predecessors in that job, Dan Halutz, has said that, “Iran poses a serious threat but not an existential one.” Earlier this month, former Mossad head Ephraim Halevy added that, “I think it is a terrible mistake to use the term ‘existential threat’ because I do not believe there is an existential threat to Israel.”

The Gantz quote was from 2012, where he argued not that Iran wouldn't use a nuclear bomb against Israel, but that Iran wouldn't try to build one to begin with. Since then we have seen countless times how Iran had hidden its nuclear weapons program and simultaneously has expanded its building of rockets whose only purpose is to deliver such a bomb, so his "rational" statement has been overtaken by facts.

Let's look at exactly what Ephraim Halevy said:

EH:I have always said that it is bad thing to use the terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘existential threat’…

AJ: Why?

EH: Because we are not in a Holocaust situation. Then, six million Jews were herded into compounds and exterminated. And this can never happen again, certainly not in Israel. We have a very effective defence system. If you say there is a danger of a Holocaust it’s like saying the IDF is of no consequence. The IDF is here not only to prevent a Holocaust but to prevent an atmosphere of fear that we can ever be on the verge of a Holocaust. That’s exactly why we build up our defence and our intelligence community. Both serve the purpose of negating the idea of a future Holocaust. There cannot be another Holocaust.

Also, I think it is a terrible mistake to use the term ‘existential threat’ because I do not believe there is an existential threat to Israel. I think the Iranians can cause us a lot of damage, if they succeed in one way or another to launch a nuclear device which will actually hit the ground here in Israel. But this in itself would not bring the State of Israel to an end. I also think that it is a terrible mistake to tell your enemy – in this case, the Iranians – ‘you are an existential threat to Israel, we the Israelis believe that you have the power to destroy us.’ It’s almost inviting them to do so, because they will say, ‘If the Israelis themselves believe that they are vulnerable and can be destroyed then that is sufficient basis to go and do it. Don’t you think so?’

Halevy is saying two things: that a nuclear bomb that actually hits Israel would not destroy Israel completely, and that using the term "existential threat" is a bad strategy because it might encourage Iran (that "rational actor" as Beinart claims) to nuke Israel.

Elie Wiesel may be engaging in a little hyperbole in saying that a bomb that would kill, say, a half million people or so will annihilate Israel. But he is talking from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor who wants to do everything in his power to stop the incineration of hundreds of thousands of his people and the slow radiation death of many more. That is a supremely moral position.

Beinart, on the other hand, hates the current elected Israeli government so much that he is willing to take the position that the murder of hundreds of thousands of Israelis is really not that big a deal just to criticize a human rights icon for daring to speak out forcefully in favor of Bibi's defending the lives of his people.

How sick is that?

Beinart shows here that - like other Ha'aretz writers - his Bibi Derangement Syndrome makes him sound less rational than Iran's leaders. The hate for Netanyahu has become so absurd that the most mainstream of all possible Zionist positions - never allow another Holocaust, encourage Aliyah, defend Israel's security - have become the target of attack simply because Bibi advocates them. What little intellectual honesty the Haaretz crowd ever had has been replaced with rabid hate.

And Western liberals still believe that it represents a mainstream Israeli viewpoint.

Peter Beinart's arguments against BDS apply to the "moderate" Palestinians as well

In Haaretz, Peter Beinart is upset over a proposed resolution by the CUNY Doctoral Students Council to boycott Israel.

Being a leftist Zionist critic of Israel, Beinart (who supports boycotting products made by Jews across the Green Line) sympathizes with their criticism but thinks that they went a bit too far. For example, here is his argument against boycotting Israeli universities:

Paragraph three declares that “Israeli institutions of higher learning are a party to Israeli state policies that violate human rights.” That’s true. They also incubate some of the most passionate opposition to those policies. “Israeli professors and students at Israeli universities who speak out against discriminatory or criminal policies against Palestinians are ostracized and ridiculed.” Yes, sometimes. Yet many Israeli professors and students do speak out against their government’s policies, because compared to most students and faculty in the world, they enjoy considerable freedom of speech. Does isolating them from their counterparts overseas really strengthen their efforts to defend liberal, cosmopolitan ideas against the hyper-nationalism of the Israeli right?

Beinart takes pains to distinguish the "good" Israeli Jews from the "bad" Israeli Jews who should be ostracized, sounding much like John Mearsheimer if not drawing the line in quite the same place.

But it is Beinart's attempt to draw another line that shows how absurd his position is:

I appreciate the fact that the BDS movement - unlike Hamas - practices nonviolence.

But I disagree with the movement’s goals. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the story of a powerful state oppressing a stateless people. But it’s also the story of rival, equally legitimate, nationalisms. In the BDS movement’s call to action, that second story is simply absent. The BDS call to action speaks of the “Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination” without any reference to a similar Jewish right. The proposed CUNY boycott resolution mentions the Palestinians killed in the recent Gaza War without acknowledging that Israeli Jews died too.

If Jewish nationalism is no more legitimate than Palestinian nationalism, then the converse is also true. The BDS movement, sadly, does not recognize that. I hope CUNY will.

If Beinart's main problem with BDS is their inability to accept the Jewish right to a homeland, then - if he wants to be consistent - he must be just as critical of the entire PLO, Palestinian Authority and Fatah.

The current "moderate" Palestinian leadership - the people that we are told over and over again from the likes of Beinart are the most moderate, peace-loving leaders that Palestinian Arabs will ever have - have the identical position as the BDS movement. If anything, they go beyond the BDS movement in that they have been explicit in their denial of Jewish nationalism.

As I reported here, the official position of the PLO is that they must not ever recognize that Jews have the right to a state, or even that the Jewish People exist! In the words of an official PLO Negotiations Unit position paper:

Recognizing the Jewish state implies recognition of a Jewish people and recognition of its right to self-determination. Those who assert this right also assert that the territory historically associated with this right of self-determination (i.e., the self-determination unit) is all of Historic Palestine. Therefore, recognition of the Jewish people and their right of self-determination may lend credence to the Jewish people’s claim to all of Historic Palestine.

The reason that they won't accept a Jewish state is because it implies that the Jewish people exist, not the other way around.

I don't think that the BDS movement ever said something that extreme.

And these are Beinart's "moderate," peace-loving pals. This is Mahmoud Abbas' official position. These people who are so hateful and deceitful that they cannot admit the existence of a Jewish people.

If the BDS movement is illegitimate because it refuses to recognize Jewish national rights, then so is virtually the entire Palestinian Arab nationalist movement.

But Beinart can't admit that, or else his entire career as a left-wing Zionist critic of Israel is in jeopardy.

Peter Beinart cannot tell the difference between a "narrative" and a fact

Peter Beinart is certainly at home at Haaretz, where stupidity can be masked as serious opinion.

On Wednesday, Beinart made one of those dumb "substitute X for Y" analogies while going after Sheldon Adelson:

Imagine this. Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, Elizabeth Warren and multiple lesser Democratic notables travel halfway across the country to kiss the ring of a Palestinian-American billionaire who has shown himself willing to spend tens of millions of dollars subsidizing presidential campaigns.

The billionaire has some provocative views. Six months earlier, he suggested that if Israel does not end its nuclear weapons program, America should drop an “atomic weapon…in the middle of the [Negev] desert that doesn’t hurt a soul.” If that doesn’t work, America should drop “the next one…in the middle of” Tel Aviv.

The billionaire insists that there is no such thing as the Jewish people. It’s a hoax; the Jews “have fooled the world very successfully.” And he declares that “There isn’t a” Jew “alive who wasn’t raised on a curriculum of hatred and hostility toward the” Palestinians.

Change the words “Democrat” to “Republican,” “Israel” to “Iran” and “Palestinian” to “Jewish,” and that’s exactly what just happened. Leading contenders for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination spent last weekend wooing and feting a billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, whose views - if directed at Jews—would put him in the company of Louis Farrakhan and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I am not thrilled with an election system that gives great power to any billionaire, whether it is Sheldon Adelson or George Soros, who has wooed Democrats just as Adelson woos Republican politicians.

Some of the stuff Adelson says is wrong. Some of it is even admittedly offensive.

But there is a huge difference between the thought experiment Beinart gives here and what Adelson actually said, a difference that shows that Beinart has fallen for one of the biggest fallacies in the Middle East: the fallacy that there is equal value in the Zionist and anti-Zionist narratives.

I am not a logician and do not know of a formal name for this fallacy, but let's call it the Assumed Symmetry Fallacy: the assumption that two sides - by virtue of their opposition - are falsely assumed to be symmetric.

In 2008, when Tel Aviv University’s Shlomo Sand published a book called “The Invention of the Jewish People,” he was widely called anti-Semitic. When Adelson says the same about Palestinians, he’s a Republican rock star.

The Palestinian Arabs are a recently invented people. They exist today, to be sure, but they were not a "people" before 1948 at the very earliest. Westerners who drew the borders after World War I created what today's Palestinian Arabs laughably call "historic Palestine" - arbitrary lines that surrounded a people who had as much in common with those across those lines as with those within them. Arabs in the Galilee had more in common with those in Damascus than those in Bethlehem. Tribes and families trumped geography (and they often still do.) They became a "people" because of how their Arab brethren refused to allow them to integrate into their countries, forcing them to suffer as a separate group that eventually did turn them into a people. Arabs themselves admit freely that they kept Palestinian Arabs in miserable conditions in order to foster their nascent "unity." (It was for their own good, in Arab logic.)

But any analogy between the brand new people now called Palestinians and the Jewish people is, simply, obscene. There is no comparison in terms of history, in terms of culture, in terms of faith or in terms of the depth of feelings that have been felt towards the land for millennia. (This doesn't negate the fact that some Palestinian Arabs do have ties to the land. But as a people, there is simply no comparison, especially since a majority of Palestinian Arabs do not trace their ancestry to the region but rather from Arabian tribes and elsewhere.)

The nuclear analogy is similarly obscene. While Adelson's suggestion can certainly be considered offensive, Beinart's comparison is sickening. Israel does not threaten other nations with its nuclear arsenal. In fact, Israel apparently has had the bomb since the 1960s and has gone through a few wars without using them. Iran, however, shows videos on its TV about the joys of nuking Israel. Israel's nuclear program is not a danger to the world, Iran's is.

And comparing Adelson with Farrakhan and Ahmadinejad is equally obscene. Adelson clearly doesn't have a grasp of the nuances of the Middle East as those of us who are immersed in it all day do, but there have been plenty of US politicians and pundits and even "experts" who say stupid and ignorant things every day. Beinart would never compare them to Farrakhan or Ahmadinejad (unless they are Republican), just as he would never compare Adelson with Soros, the closest analogy, because Soros' politics are far more acceptable to Beinart.

Beinart further quotes Adelson:

“There isn’t a Palestinian alive who wasn’t raised on a curriculum of hatred and hostility toward the Jews,” he told the Jewish Press in 2011.

Adelson was not careful with his words the way a journalist would be, but if he would have said "Palestinians are routinely taught to hate Jews" - does Beinart disagree? He is more upset at Adelson's generalization, eagerly branding him as having a "culture of hate," without acknowledging the elephant in the room that Palestinians really do have a culture of hate. Not one person - an entire people. While there is racism on the Jewish side, there is nothing remotely similar to the pervasiveness of hate on the Palestinian Arab side. But Beinart doesn't care about that because an old rich Jewish man is unacceptably generalizing, oh, at least 95% of Palestinian Arabs to include the 5% that Beinart likes to pretend represents reality.

In other words, Beinart proves here with his Assumed Symmetry Fallacy thought experiments that he is at least as biased as Adelson is.

Recently, Palestinian Arab politicians claimed that their police found a secret Israeli lab that turned marijuana into heroin to give to Palestinian Arab youths. Mahmoud Abbas' aides have said that the Temple never existed. Abbas himself accused Israeli Jews of raising wild boars just to attack Arab farmers.

This is part of the Palestinian Arab "narrative." Zionists (and any sane people) would say that these stories are nonsense.

Do the two sides of "narratives" have equal value? Apparently, in Beinart's universe, the truth is not as important as what people believe the truth to be. Both sides are the same! Feelings trump facts, and fake history is just as valid as real history because favoring truth over lies can make the liars upset.

Beinart's fallacious thought experiments and use of false analogies are a lazy rhetorical method that good writers and thinkers know to avoid. Beinart is neither a good writer nor a thinker.

Peter Beinart, hypocrite

From Peter Beinart in Haaretz:

Last spring, some students at New York’s most prestigious Orthodox Jewish high school, Ramaz, eager for a greater diversity of perspectives on Israel, invited me to speak to their club. I did - and enjoyed it immensely - but told them I hadn’t solved their problem. If they wanted a truly open discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I ventured, they needed to do more than hear from both hawkish and dovish Zionists. They needed to hear from Palestinians.

To my surprise, they asked me to help make it happen. I recommended Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi, partly because he’s a world-renowned expert on Palestinian history and partly because I know Orthodox Jewish graduate students who consider him a mentor and friend. Khalidi agreed; the students were thrilled. He was set to speak on February 19.

Next thing I knew, the head of the Ramaz Upper School had canceled the talk and students had gathered a petition demanding “open dialogue” about Israel.

...What does it say about the administrators at Ramaz that after immersing their high school students in a passionately Zionist environment for years and years, they lack the self-confidence to expose them to one lecture from a Palestinian?

When Peter Beinart was the editor of the ill-fated "Open Zion" experiment, he did not seek to include a single Jewish resident of Judea and Samaria as a regular writer. (He had one token right winger, and people he claimed were right-wingers but who support a two-state solution.)

I have never seen a Jewish resident of Judea and Samaria invited to speak at any event at Amnesty International, at Human Rights Watch, at any non explicitly Zionist event at any university, at any "Jewish Voice for Peace" event, or at any "Peace Now" event.

Why isn't Beinart deriding all of these groups for being against "open dialogue?" Doesn't their failure to invite right-wing Zionists to speak prove their lack of self-confidence in their positions?

Oh, no. Only right wing Zionists and right wing Orthodox Jews are uninterested in dialogue.

The media is filled with anti-Zionism as a given. The idea that Jews have a right to live in their ancestral lands - even those legally purchased by their very grandfathers - is anathema in the press. Right-wing Zionists are far, far more exposed to leftist opinions than vice versa. The extent of leftist knowledge of right-wing Zionist positions is that they are all either religious fanatics or hell-bent on ethnic cleansing; they could not even fathom any arguments for Jews living in Judea and Samaria based on international law, human rights or basic ethics. I've seen their arguments, and they do not usually go beyond proof by assertion. Doesn't that betray a lack of self-confidence in their positions?

Beinart, supposedly so interested in openness, only advocates openness for one side.

High school students don't exactly have the most mature knowledge of subject matter, yet Beinart insists that Zionist students be exposed to positions that go against their upbringing and their parents' wishes. But right-wingers are not welcome by leftist groups meant for adults!

Who is lacking self confidence?

Are there any Catholic high schools that would invite an atheist to speak to their students? Are there any that would invite gay activists to speak to their students? For that matter, would any public high schools ask people who advocate open marriages to speak? Would they invite the people behind websites that encourage people to cheat on their spouses to discuss Internet entrepreneurship? Isn't everything fair game? Doesn't this show a lack of self-confidence?

Or is that only an issue for Zionist Orthodox Jewish high school students?

If Ramaz students want to hear from Khalidi, there is no shortage of ways for them to access his books and articles. No one is stopping them. But that doesn't mean that their private school must invite an entire gamut of opinion that is antithetical to what that school teaches. This is common sense - to all except Peter Beinart.

Even worse, Khalidi - who Beinart praises so highly and wants to speak to young Zionists - is a liar. He claims that the 1936 riots that killed hundreds in Palestine were "non-violent." He claims that Jews are not a people. He lies about Avigdor Lieberman's positions. His history is filled with inaccuracies. And here we see that he pushes bizarre conspiracy theories.

So Beinart wants a lying, viciously anti-Israel activist who is against a two-state solution to spout propaganda to impressionable young Jews, but he does not say a word about dedicated Zionists making a fair case to non- and anti-Zionists. (Of course, Beinart's brand of "Zionism" is the most right-wing that is acceptable for dialogue, everyone to the right of him must not be heard.)

Is that hypocritical? You bet.

(h/t Alex)

If Peter Beinart were around in 1929...

(A followup to my essay yesterday.)

Peter Beinart's cocoon

In the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart is upset that the organized American Jewish community doesn't invite Palestinian Arabs to speak at their events. He believes that American Jews don't give enough empathy to Palestinian Arabs.

For the most part, Palestinians do not speak in American synagogues or write in the Jewish press. The organization Birthright, which since 1999 has taken almost 350,000 young Diaspora Jews—mostly Americans—to visit Israel, does not venture to Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank. Of the more than two hundred advertised speakers at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) 2013 Policy Conference, two were Palestinians. By American Jewish standards, that’s high. The American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum earlier this year, which advertised sixty-four speakers, did not include a single Palestinian.

...Guidelines like Hillel’s—which codify the de facto restrictions that exist in many establishment American Jewish groups—make the organized American Jewish community a closed intellectual space, isolated from the experiences and perspectives of roughly half the people under Israeli control. And the result is that American Jewish leaders, even those who harbor no animosity toward Palestinians, know little about the reality of their lives.

Beinart grudgingly admits:

This lack of familiarity with Palestinian life also inclines many in the organized American Jewish world to assume that Palestinian anger toward Israel must be a product solely of Palestinian pathology. Rare is the American Jewish discussion of Israel that does not include some reference to the textbooks and television programs that “teach Palestinians to hate.” These charges have some merit. Palestinian schools and media do traffic in anti-Semitism and promote violence.

But:

Still, what’s often glaringly absent from the American Jewish discussion of Palestinian hatred is any recognition that some of it might stem not from what Palestinians read or hear about the Jewish state, but from the way they interact with it in their daily lives.

Beinart is at least as guilty of willful blindness as the American Jewish establishment he is insulting. His "Open Zion" site all but ignores the Palestinian Arab hate and antisemitism, just as he attempts to minimize it and contextualize it here as a natural result of things Israelis did. He says that most terror attacks are the result of anger at Israeli actions from the first intifada, without mentioning who started the first intifada. No doubt Israel's initial reaction was more severe than would be acceptable today, but at the time Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza would travel freely to pre-1967 Israel and Israelis would visit freely to Arab areas, without fear.

The restrictions that Beinart is so upset about today came because of Palestinian Arab terror, not the other way around.

Moreover, while Beinart talks about checkpoints that exist today, what does he think would happen if a two-state solution that he so passionately supports would occur? They wouldn't be checkpoints - there would be national borders. Try commuting to another country every day, let alone an enemy country, and see how painless it is.

American Jewish leaders have access to The New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian and, yes, Open Zion. Jewish Americans read Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen. The idea that they somehow live in a pro-Likud bubble is ridiculous. They know far more about Palestinian Arab claims and grievances than readers of Open Zion know about the day to day incitement against Israel and Jews in Palestinian Arab lives - not just "textbooks and television programs" but virtually every newspaper, every school, every medium.

This is the stuff I expose along with MEMRI, Palestinian Media Watch and others.

Beinart would like to pretend that we cherry pick the worst examples. To an extent that is true. That's how the media works - to show the worst in order to illuminate the facts - something Beinart is doing in this very essay.

However, as someone who reads quite a bit of Arabic media daily, I can assure Beinart and my readers that the hate isn't an anomaly, while people like Salam Fayyad are the silent majority. No - within the "cocoon" of Palestinian Arab life, there is zero tolerance for any viewpoint that is the least bit conciliatory to real coexistence and peace. The hate is pervasive, not anomalous. Anyone who would speak to an American Jewish organization would, by that very fact, lose all legitimacy from their own people.

Beinart knows this, but he won't dare say it.

One need only look at this post from yesterday to see that this is true. Not only is there virtually no voice for true peace among Palestinian Arabs, but even the slightest attempts at coexistence are demonized and practitioners blacklisted.

How often does Open Zion report on this? For that matter, how much does the NYT, BBC and other mainstream media (the recent Forbes piece being a rare exception) report on this?

Where are the Palestinian Arab "Open Zions?" Where are the people who really want co-existence who can speak out without being tarred that worst of all insults - "collaborators"? You will not find any Arab Beinarts writing for Palestinian Arabic media.

Beinart's own self-created cocoon where he pretends that most Palestinian Arabs want peace is even more bizarre. In his entire lengthy essay, he does not mention Islamic fundamentalism once. The reason is once again willful blindness - Beinart knows that there is no way that fundamentalist Muslims, represented by Hamas - winner in the last PA elections - would ever accept Israel's existence in any manner.

So Beinart chooses to ignore that problem and pretend that Salam Fayyad, an unelected former prime minister who barely scraped together 2.4% of the vote for his own party, is mainstream and Hamas is all but nonexistent.

Even though he admits that "Virtually every Palestinian I’ve ever met considers Zionism to be colonialist, imperialist, and racist. " Sure, let's invite them over to the Hadassah meeting so we can hear all about it!

That is willful blindness of a far worse kind than anything he can say about the American Jewish establishment.

The real cocoon is the one that looks at the Middle East and pretends that it is Jewish American leadership that is somehow more in denial than liberals like Beinart. The real cocoon is the place where the extent of Palestinian Arab intransigence and hate is downplayed and glossed over as simply a few TV programs and textbooks, with no mention of, say, Gaza being controlled by a separate party that considers all of Israel to be "occupied." The real cocoon is the place where, even in light of the Arab Spring, Muslim fundamentalism simply isn't worth mentioning as a problem.

Israel doesn't want to oppress anybody, but it has an obligation to protect its citizens - the supreme obligation of any nation. The line it needs to walk in order to do that is a thin and jagged one, and one that for the most part has been successful. Today there is less terror than ever before even as restrictions on Palestinian Arabs are being slowly lifted. This is what should be emphasized, highlighted and encouraged.

Beinart, though, is blind to the real facts - because he is the one who lives in a cocoon.