Updated: Our scoop has been confirmed in an announcement by Atlantic Media. Politico says Open Zion “will cease to exist.” And Haaretz has also announced that it is hiring Beinart to write about the issue. “Peter Beinart will be joining it as a senior columnist beginning January 1, 2014. Beinart will be writing for Haaretz exclusively and on a regular basis on issues related to the complex triangle of Israel, America, and the American Jewish community.”
Peter Beinart, the leading voice of liberal Zionism, is said to be leaving the Daily Beast and it is likely that Open Zion, the website he edits about the conflict at the Daily Beast, will close as a consequence.
Open Zion calls itself “a new conversation about Israel, Palestine and the Jewish future.” Though chiefly liberal Zionist, it has also distinguished itself in the mainstream with its news reporting and by publishing pieces that are critical of Israel and even express anti-Zionist views.
I’m told that Beinart is going to The Atlantic and that he made the decision to leave after it was announced in September that Tina Brown was departing as editor of the Daily Beast. Brown is a big supporter of Beinart’s, though the funding for Open Zion chiefly came from other sources than the Daily Beast, including the New America Foundation, the Daily Beast’s partner on the project.
Another factor is that Beinart doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed as a writer on the Israel/Palestine issue but maintain his reputation as a political writer on a range of American issues.
But because Open Zion is so closely connected to Beinart’s brand– his name and photograph appear on its front page, and he launched the site at about the same time that he published his book The Crisis of Zionism in April 2012— his leaving endangers the future of the site. I’m told the likelihood is that the site will close, but that Beinart is trying to find a home for the site. (I emailed Beinart to say I was writing about Open Zion but he said he was busy teaching today and then did not respond.)
His departure from the Daily Beast is a blow to those trying to force left-leaning Zionism into the discussion on Israel/Palestine. Beinart is liberal Zionism’s leading journalistic force. He has been a rock star at J Street’s annual conference; in 2012 young people went around wearing t-shirts saying “Beinart’s Army.”
The site’s leadership includes rightwinger Gil Troy, but it has a liberal Zionist orientation, stating:
Open Zion will foster an open and unafraid conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the Jewish future. We believe in a two-state solution in accordance with the liberal Zionist principles articulated in Israel’s declaration of independence, which promises a Jewish state that ensures “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.” But we also believe in respectful argument with those who disagree; we aim not to draw red lines but to debate them.
Now in his early 40s, Beinart first came to notice as the editor of the New Republic in the early 2000s, when he supported the Iraq war. A former guest at AIPAC conferences, Beinart burst into the Israel/Palestine discussion with a landmark piece in the New York Review of Books in spring 2010 called The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, in which he said that by suppressing a discussion of Israel’s human rights abuses, the leading Jewish organizations were failing to “save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth.” He is an associate professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York and a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.
It would be a shame for OZ to fold. I am much more intellectually inclined toward MW, but OZ did publish a very wide range of opinion, including Yousef Munayyer as a regular contributor. Some other writers, like Emily Hauser, wrote very credible articles. There was some dreck as well, though I read Gil Troy for comic relief. I think OZ was mostly read by liberal Zionists of the Beinart sensibility, people who I think should be encouraged to re-think Zionism entirely.
Sorry to have to keep beating this drum against Beihart, but I’m always amazed when people like him continue to be taken seriously as pundits and policy analysts. He was a cheerleader for the criminal war of aggression waged by the U.S. against Iraq. He made serious policy arguments in favor of a war based on blatant lies and driven by a media propaganda campaign so transparent that even a child could see through it. And yet Beinart is still allowed to teach journalism and political science at a major university.
I’m no policy “wunderkind,” (a term which has actually been applied to this arrogant punk) and yet myself and tens of millions of other thinking human beings around the world understood that a heinous crime was being committed against the people of Iraq. We had the courage to stand against it. Beinhart made his living promoting it.
So now we are supposed to grant him credibility regarding any views he may have on foreign policy issues? He should be laughed off the stage wherever he appears. Instead, people buy his books and applaud his absurd ideological blatherings. It’s sort of like saying, “Well, just because he used to believe in Santa Clause doesn’t mean we shouldn’t trust him now.”
Wow, what a world we live in. The irony takes ones breath away.
Perhaps MW should reconsider its own views.
Perhaps the theory behind OZ was to speak to the LZ Jews, saying: WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, but EVEN SO there are some roughnesses around the edges that we need to become more aware of. The old song, “We didn’t know” that was so popular in Germany after 1945 doesn’t sit well with Jews — any more — now that it is themselves who are singing it.
Beinart was a wunderkind but Zionism chews them up and careerists are particularly at risk. You gotta bend over and mouth the hasbara. It was the same with the Iraq war so he has the experience. Very hard to bring the people along if they don’t want to know.
The Beast lost too much money which is why Brown jumped. It is hard to make journal ism pay and anti Zionism is even more of a challenge.