The Quite Unnecessary Peter Beinart

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Peter Beinart is Jewish, and he has just one subject, to which he returns again and again: his own superior virtue, that is on display when he tells the world how much he despises Zionism and the state of Israel. He’s just written another book on the subject, a book which Stephen Pollard discusses in a devastating review to be found here: “‘For Peter Beinart, focusing on the right of Jews to be secure from terrorists is immoral,’” The Jewish Chronicle, February 20, 2025:

Peter Beinart wants us to feel sorry for him: “When I enter a synagogue, I am no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away.”

Well, I’ll fathom a guess. Every shul has its version of a Beinart – the intellectually gifted wiseacre who thinks that he has some sort of special insight denied to the rest of the community. For the most part, they humour him. He may be pompous; he may be irritating. But he is essentially harmless. They will, of course, shake his hand, even if they might not want to break bread with him.

But sometimes this Beinart goes a stage further, flaunting a supposed moral superiority based on the repudiation of almost everyone and everything that holds the community of which he is a part together. So subsumed does he become in his self-righteousness that everything fuels his ego – and when the shul members start to give him a wide berth, that itself adds to his belief that they are not on his moral plane.

The actual Peter Beinart was once interesting. A former editor of the New Republic in the days when it was a serious journal, he was a mainstream liberal Zionist who wrote well and thought provokingly. But over the past decade, from the publication in 2012 of The Crisis of Zionism, he has travelled so far across the terrain of liberal Zionism that he has left it altogether and become an avowed anti-Zionist – a campaigner for the abolition of Israel altogether, to be replaced by a single state with full equality between Palestinians and Israelis. He has become that shul parody, hawking his self-proclaimed moral superiority around as if the rest of us should be grateful to have such a man in our midst, rather than feeling ashamed of him.

That has been given full rein in his latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. This is a book that not only need never have been written but that does not need to be read.

Tolstoy described such a book as “nikomu ne nuzhnaya kniga” (not-needed-by-anyone book).

Its most obvious pointlessness is that it is simply boring, a predictable regurgitation of every slander against Israel. We get ethnic cleansing, apartheid, massacres and all the usual stuff. Why bother with Beinart when this is the everyday diet of the media? Beinart jazzes it up with a rant against anyone even vaguely associated with speaking up for Israel in the wake of the October 7 massacre. If that sounds repulsive, it is because it is. Beinart goes through the motions of condemning what happened on October 7 but spends far longer attacking those who have stood up for Israel since then. As he writes at the start, in his “note to my former friend”: “I consider your single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral and self-defeating.” Think about that for a second (because that is all it is worth). For Beinart, focusing on the right of Jews to be secure from terrorists is “immoral”.

If you’re worried about the impact on Jews of having to live alongside Palestinians in a single state – if you’re worried, that is, that they would be slaughtered – then don’t be, because Beinart says it worked in South Africa so it will work in the new not-Israel state. And that’s it. That is the entire basis on which he thinks the world should take the leap into deciding that the Jews no longer need a state.

In fact, South Africa is hardly a model to be emulated. Whites in South Africa have increasingly been leaving the country out of concern for their safety. White farmers are being murdered. The black South African leader and millionaire Julius Malema sings in public “Kill the farmer, kill the Boer,” and his other favorite lyrics include “Kill the white man. Kill the white woman. Kill the white children.” And it has been happening. Is that the South Africa that Beinart thinks should serve as a model for that Jewish-Arab state he favors?

Beinart “no longer” believes in Zionism. He has no sympathy for the continued existence of a Jewish state. He believes instead that Israelis should give up the idea of a Jewish state, and live in a single state with people who have just demonstrated in a most convincing way their pleasure in raping, torturing, mutilating, and murdering Jews, who just the other day screamed with delight, while martial music played, at the spectacle of Israeli corpses in coffins that had been placed in front of the crowd. Inside two of those four coffins, as the delirious crowd knew, were the bodies of the Bibas brothers — four-year old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir — who had been killed, according to Israeli forensic experts, by the bare hands of Hamas killers. In other words, they had been strangled or suffocated, like the princes in the Tower.