Peter Beinart’s Israel Delusion, and the Palestinian Wizards of Oz

This inversion of morality is insidious, and the logical endpoint is a complete devaluation of Jewish life. One wonders, for an American, how they would feel about Natives Americans murdering random families. Would that be justified? Because, despite Beinart’s attempt to normalize terrorism, they don’t do that.

A major plank in Beinart’s thesis is that the only reason Jews are afraid to share a state equally, or as a minority with Arabs, is an obsession with victimhood, and projections from the Holocaust experience. Jews don’t need the Holocaust to fear Arab violence. That relationship stands on its own, through existential wars and genocidal threats in 1948 and 1967. Through the Hamas Charter, and constant calls for the death of every Jew in the world.

When Beinart does mention the Palestinian leadership aligning with the Nazis, he tosses that off too as a natural thing to do in the fight against British colonialism. Yeah, sure, but they also wanted, and discussed with Hitler, the extermination of the Jews in Arab lands.

Beinart not only forgets the first modern Zionists who were fleeing massacres in Russia, but he ignores the majority of Israeli Jews: Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, who have experienced life as a minority in an Arabic nation. Their experience of being raped, robbed, beaten, humiliated and chased from their countries of origin is not discussed. The Farhud in Iraq, the Mawza Exile in Yemen. But Beinart has studies from Ireland!

It is ugly, but somehow poetic, that Beinart’s piece came out to a multi-year backdrop of Jews fleeing antisemitism in Europe, and in the same week as major American cultural icons have been spouting anti-Semitism to millions of followers, and the last Jews in Yemen are attacked.

Why do people expect Jews, alone, to risk national suicide? It’s like Israel-haters learned about Masada and figured, yeah, they’ll be down. No. We are not down. Maybe one day a shared state will be possible. But it won’t happen by lying about the risks, and about how we got here. Lies and false hopes will continue to perpetuate violence, as they have for the preceding decades.