In a delusory column in the New York Times, Bret Stephens says Israel only wants to annex land because it has been “ostracized” in the West. And American Jewish status is “fragile,” unlike in Israel. These crazed claims show that Israel advocates cannot deal with an argument for Palestinian rights.
Sheen Arackal argues “Israel was established as a binational state by the UN in 1947 and remains a binational state to this day because all refugees have an inalienable right to return home.”
Israel has gone from attacking former US President Jimmy Carter for using the “A” word in the title of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, to having to deal with an Israeli organization making the legal case that the entire state may be an Apartheid state.
The American Jewish community should make Peter Beinart a “pariah” just like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar; because like a Holocaust denier, he has questioned a “fundament of Jewish history,” the fact that 2000 years show Jews can’t be safe unless they have sovereignty and control their own destiny. So says Israeli author Daniel Gordis.
Rob Malley says that the young Democrats are pushing an “inflection point” on U.S. policy in Israel/Palestine, questioning pro-Israel policy now that the peace process has “failed.” And Peter Beinart sensed this generational moment, and jumped, his editor says.
In advocating for one state in Israel and Palestine, Peter Beinart has been dry or vague about the right of return for Palestinian refugees forced out of their homeland. But he has also conceded the moral validity of that right, and opened up a discussion liberal Zionists don’t want to have, as they enjoy the fruits of that ethnic cleansing.
Peter Beinart is so important in Jewish culture because he insists on humanizing Palestinians, and refuses to use the Holocaust lens of perpetual victimhood when considering Palestinian resistance. Palestinians are not driven by Jew hatred, as so many pro-Israel leaders argue, but by a natural response to dispossession and occupation.
Change is in the air and the Israel lobby can no longer stamp it out by using its gatekeepers to censor and malign opposing voices. This is the real significance of Bari Weiss’s resignation from the New York Times.
Peter Beinart’s abandonment of belief in the Jewish state has caused Congress members to question two-state belief. Why such influence? Because Beinart was part of the liberal Zionist Israel lobby, and his loss of faith threatens the lobby’s power politics not to mention a solemn commitment by the west to a Jewish state.