Peter Beinart’s call for equality seeks to reform Israel as a Jewish project instead of repudiating its system of racial supremacy, placing Jewish identity above Palestinian rights.
“We pretended to my shame at times in the Obama administration that Netanyahu was interested in the two-state solution. When I dont think he was, ever,” Ben Rhodes says. And Rhodes is just as cynical about Palestinian opportunities for sovereignty under the Obama administration. “I can tell you we didn’t really give them one when I was there. Not a real one.”
Saying that the dehumanization of Palestinians is a cancer in the Jewish community, Peter Beinart is no longer showing deference to the Jewish guardians of the communal victimhood discourse. This is his cultural importance,” claiming Jewish authority for himself and discrediting Bari Weiss’s discourse of victimhood.
This year has been a slog, but from the Squad to BDS victories there have also been things to celebrate in 2020.
When Israeli soldiers killed a 15-year-old Palestinian boy for protesting Jewish settlers taking his land, it ought to have been a George Floyd moment for liberal Jews. But Americans for Peace Now chatters about John Lennon not Ali Abu Alia, and dreams about a two-state solution that will never happen. It is time for Zionism to experience a crisis, and Jews must support the only hope for change in Palestine, BDS.
Today the idea of a hopeful, humane Zionism is obsolete. For more than 100 years Jews wrestled with Zionism’s darkness. Daphna Levit profiles those thinkers, who range from enshrined heavyweights like Buber, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt, through more specialized contemporary scholars, journalists, activists, and lawyers. All of them once believed in a hopeful Zionism; all resisted its darkness; not all of them went all the way to renounce it completely.
Bari Weiss’s rage over Peter Beinart’s role in a panel on antisemitism with Rashida Tlaib and Marc Lamont Hill next month shows that Weiss is in a battle with Beinart about who will represent American Jews. Weiss represents a tribal perspective of sacred victimhood; and Beinart’s universalism and openness to the Palestinian story is a threat to her.
Park Avenue Synagogue inserts the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikva, into its Yom Kippur liturgy, as Rabbi Neil Zuckerman praises his son for overcoming exile in New York and going “home” to Israel and joining Israel’s army. “There is no mistaking it: Zionism is the synagogue’s core value that takes over at a key moment in the Yom Kippur service,” says one observer.
Even as UAE clamps down on a poet, its ambassador celebrates tyranny to pro-Israel group. Yousef Al Otaiba: “People always think we don’t pay attention to public opinion inside the Emirates because we are not a democracy, and it’s actually quite the opposite. Because we’re not a democracy we have to be very in tune with what our people want and what the Street feel.”
Beinart’s declaration of support for one democratic state has exposed intolerant attitudes among liberal Zionists. For instance, Palestinian leader Ayman Odeh says he wants to represent all Israelis and be like MLK, but Michael Koplow of IPF says he can’t represent Israeli Jews. Really? Why not? And why should an American be indulging such racism?