Overview

Peter Beinart was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971, to Jewish parents who had immigrated to the United States from South Africa. In 1993 Beinart earned a degree in American history and political science at Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Political Union. In 1995 he received an M.Phil. in international relations at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. After completing his formal education, Beinart was hired as managing editor of The New Republic in 1995; two years later he became a senior editor for that same magazine, and from 1999-2006 he served as its editor.

Today, Beinart is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

America’s Duty to Promote Liberal Democracies Abroad

In December 2004, Beinart published a lengthy, influential article in The New Republic titled “A Fighting Faith,” which argued that the U.S. had a moral duty to promote the rise of liberal democracies abroad, particularly in the Middle East, as a means of countering the rise of authoritarianism, extremism, and terrorism in the post-9/11 era. Some excerpts:

“Today, three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, … American liberalism, as defined by its activist organizations, remains largely what it was in the 1990s–a collection of domestic interests and concerns. On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda–even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though, if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.

“When liberals talk about America’s new era, the discussion is largely negative–against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America’s worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions–most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn–that do not put the struggle against America’s new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America’s new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage. […]

“Obviously, Al Qaeda and the Soviet Union are not the same. The USSR was a totalitarian superpower; Al Qaeda merely espouses a totalitarian ideology, which has had mercifully little access to the instruments of state power. Communism was more culturally familiar, which provided greater opportunities for domestic subversion but also meant that the United States could more easily mount an ideological response. The peoples of the contemporary Muslim world are far more cynical than the peoples of cold war Eastern Europe about U.S. intentions, though they still yearn for the freedoms the United States embodies.

“But, despite these differences, Islamist totalitarianism–like Soviet totalitarianism before it–threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism’s north star. Methods for defeating totalitarian Islam are a legitimate topic of internal liberal debate. But the centrality of the effort is not. The recognition that liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more illiberal, than George W. Bush should be the litmus test of a decent left.

“Today, the war on terrorism is partially obscured by the war in Iraq, which has made liberals cynical about the purposes of U.S. power. But, even if Iraq is Vietnam, it no more obviates the war on terrorism than Vietnam obviated the battle against communism. Global jihad will be with us long after American troops stop dying in Falluja and Mosul. And thus, liberalism will rise or fall on whether it can become, again, what [historian Arthur] Schlesinger [Jr.] called ‘a fighting faith.’

“Of all the things contemporary liberals can learn from their forbearers half a century ago, perhaps the most important is that national security can be a calling. If the struggles for gay marriage and universal health care lay rightful claim to liberal idealism, so does the struggle to protect the United States by spreading freedom in the Muslim world. It, too, can provide the moral purpose for which a new generation of liberals yearn.”

The Good Fight: Why Only Liberals Can Defeat Terrorism

Beinart’s work at The New Republic culminated in 2006 with the publication of his first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. In this book, the author maintained that American liberals were best positioned to lead the fight against international terrorism because they were likelier than their conservative counterparts to stay true to democratic ideals. His critique of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy, particularly the invasion of Iraq, resonated with a growing segment of the American public who were disillusioned with the war and its aftermath.

On June 1, 2006, The New Republic published the transcript of an interview wherein then-journalist Kevin Drum said to Beinart: “In The Good Fight, you draw a historical parallel between anti-communism in the 1940s and anti-jihadism today. But events on the ground don’t suggest to me that Islamic jihadism is as dangerous and expansive today as global communism was in the ’40s and ’50s.” Beinart replied:

“I try to take pains in the book to suggest that in many, many very important ways the moment we’re in now is very different than the moment of the early cold war. No historical periods, of course, are ever the same. All historical periods differ in quite radical ways and one of the reasons I try to tell the story from 1946 through September 10, 2001, and then pick it up again after September 11, is to show that in these very different historical circumstances you can still pick up certain intellectual threads that I think are important. It’s an intellectual history. One of the meta-points of the book is that understanding our intellectual history is going to be critical to a liberal revival, just as intellectual history was very important to what the conservative movement was able to do over the past couple decades. And understanding intellectual history is important not because the historical analogies are exact, but because most people don’t think of great ideas de nouveau; they adapt ideas in their tradition that already existed.

“I don’t think that jihadism is the equal of communism. Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries. If there’s any parallel it’s between these cadre of globalization-related threats we face today and the communist threat.

“But I would add, just by way of not being too light on the threat of jihadism, and because it is something that worries me a little bit, that there is a bit of a tendency sometimes amongst liberals to think that because George W. Bush has hyped this so much that it’s mostly hype. If you look at the Lugar poll, which I cite in the book, Senator Richard Lugar, who is not an ideologue, gets together all these non-proliferation types and basically says what are the chances we’re going to be hit with a weapon of mass destruction attack in the next ten years? They say 70 percent. He says what are the chances we are going to be hit with a nuclear attack? They say 30 percent. And 80 percent say it is most likely that one of those will come from a terrorist group. And these are not people who are on [Republican political strategist] Karl Rove’s payroll.”

Fierce Critic of Israel

In 2010, Beinart, who had long expressed support for a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East, published an essay titled “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” which appeared in the June 10th issue of The New York Review of Books. In this piece, Beinart established himself as one of the most visible and outspoken critics of the Israeli government’s policies, as he claimed that: (a) American Jews had been unjustifiably unwavering in their support of what Beinart viewed as Israel’s maltreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; and (b) the American Jewish community’s silence on Israel’s human-rights abuses was damaging not onlt to the Jewish state’s reputation, but also to the values of American liberalism. Some key excerpts from Beinart’s essay:

“In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

“The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. ‘Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,’ he reported. ‘Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they’ rather than ‘us’ to describe the situation.’

“That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that ‘non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,’ with many professing ‘a near-total absence of positive feelings.’ […]

“Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, ‘they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.’ These young Jews, Luntz explained, ‘resist anything they see as group think.’ They want an ‘open and frank’ discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, ‘young Jews desperately want peace.’ When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled ‘Proof that Israel Wants Peace,’ and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, ‘some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.’ When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.

“Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives. […]

“[F]ewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

“Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.

“Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, ‘After decades of what came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into openly contesting versions.’ One version, ‘founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power and solidarity.’ Another, ‘nourished by secularized versions of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress,’ articulates ‘a deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values.’ Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth. […]

“[I]n Israel today, [a] humane, universalistic Zionism does not wield power. To the contrary, it is gasping for air. To understand how deeply antithetical its values are to those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, it’s worth considering the case of Effi Eitam. Eitam, a charismatic ex–cabinet minister and war hero, has proposed ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank. ‘We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system,’ he declared in 2006. In 2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu’s Likud. And for the 2009–2010 academic year, he is Netanyahu’s special emissary for overseas ‘campus engagement.’ […]

“In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a ‘ghetto-state’ with ‘Auschwitz borders.’ And the effort ‘to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel’ resembles Hitler’s bid to wrench the German-speaking ‘Sudeten district’ from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is unfair, Netanyahu insists, to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made vast, gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state. […]

“Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young…. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset. An education ministry official called the survey ‘a huge warning signal in light of the strengthening trends of extremist views among the youth.’

“You might think that such trends, and the sympathy for them expressed by some in Israel’s government, would occasion substantial public concern—even outrage—among the leaders of organized American Jewry. You would be wrong. In Israel itself, voices from the left, and even center, warn in increasingly urgent tones about threats to Israeli democracy. […] But in the United States, groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference patrol public discourse, scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which all leaders cherish democracy and yearn for peace.

“The result is a terrible irony. In theory, mainstream American Jewish organizations still hew to a liberal vision of Zionism. On its website, AIPAC celebrates Israel’s commitment to ‘free speech and minority rights.’ The Conference of Presidents declares that ‘Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace.’ These groups would never say, as do some in Netanyahu’s coalition, that Israeli Arabs don’t deserve full citizenship and West Bank Palestinians don’t deserve human rights. But in practice, by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire. […]

“Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years, American Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world’s most respected international human rights groups. In 2006, [Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham] Foxman called an Amnesty International report on Israeli killing of Lebanese civilians “bigoted, biased, and borderline anti-Semitic.” The Conference of Presidents has announced that ‘biased NGOs include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Aid, [and] Save the Children.’ […]

“Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible. But when groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference avoid virtually all public criticism of Israeli actions—directing their outrage solely at Israel’s neighbors—they leave themselves in a poor position to charge bias. […]

“If American Jewish groups claim that Israel’s overseas human rights critics are motivated by anti- Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, bias, what does that say about Israel’s domestic human rights critics? The implication is clear: they must be guilty of self-hatred, if not treason. American Jewish leaders don’t generally say that, of course, but their allies in the Netanyahu government do. […]

“In 2002, America’s major Jewish organizations sponsored a large Israel solidarity rally on the Washington Mall. Up and down the east coast, yeshivas shut down for the day, swelling the estimated Orthodox share of the crowd to close to 70 percent. When the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the rally that ‘innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well,’ he was booed.

“America’s Jewish leaders should think hard about that rally. Unless they change course, it portends the future: an American Zionist movement that does not even feign concern for Palestinian dignity and a broader American Jewish population that does not even feign concern for Israel. My own children, given their upbringing, could as easily end up among the booers as among Luntz’s focus group. Either prospect fills me with dread.

“In 2004, in an effort to prevent weapons smuggling from Egypt, Israeli tanks and bulldozers demolished hundreds of houses in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Watching television, a veteran Israeli commentator and politician named Tommy Lapid saw an elderly Palestinian woman crouched on all fours looking for her medicines amid the ruins of her home. He said she reminded him of his grandmother. In that moment, Lapid captured the spirit that is suffocating within organized American Jewish life. […]

“Of course, Israel—like the United States—must sometimes take morally difficult actions in its own defense. But they are morally difficult only if you allow yourself some human connection to the other side. Otherwise, security justifies everything. The heads of AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference should ask themselves what Israel’s leaders would have to do or say to make them scream ‘no.’ After all, … settlements are growing at triple the rate of the Israeli population; half of Israeli Jewish high school students want Arabs barred from the Knesset. If the line has not yet been crossed, where is the line?

“What infuriated critics about Lapid’s comment was that his grandmother died at Auschwitz. How dare he defile the memory of the Holocaust? Of course, the Holocaust is immeasurably worse than anything Israel has done or ever will do. But at least Lapid used Jewish suffering to connect to the suffering of others. In the world of AIPAC, the Holocaust analogies never stop, and their message is always the same: Jews are licensed by their victimhood to worry only about themselves. […] As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, ‘Victimhood sets you free.’

“This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.”

In a 2010 lecture which he delivered at Temple Beth in Los Angeles, Beinart:

• condemned “radical [Israeli] settlers who used violence against Palestinians,” though he provided no information about what percentage of the settlers were actually involved in such violence, or about the comparative incidence of Palestinian violence against Jewish settlers;
• lamented that Israel was undermining “the [traditional] recognition that it is acceptable to withdraw from land if it meant saving lives,” even though both Israeli and Palestinian fatalities had soared to unprecedented levels ever since the doctrine of “land-for-peace” had been introduced into Israeli policy;
• said that while it would be “wrong” to “ask Israel to be willing to not defend itself,” not “every military action” by the Jewish state was justifiable;
• argued that “the Gaza blockade which banned a vast, vast number of consumer products that had nothing to do with making rockets” had created “more and more and more hatred of Israel” around the world, while omitting the fact that the imposition of the blockade had been necessitated in the first place by a relentless wave of Palestinian terrorism; and
• asserted that while the construction of “an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a disaster,” Israel in such a case would simply “have to deal with some of the things [that India was already facing] with [a nuclear] Pakistan on its borders.”[1]

The Icarus Syndrome: A Warning against American Hubris

Also in 2010, Beinart published The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. Drawing on the myth of Icarus—a figure in Greek mythology whose wings melted when he recklessly flew too close to the sun—Beinart argues that the United States has often displayed a similar kind of hubris rooted in an unshakable sense of American exceptionalism, moral superiority, and invincibility. Such hubris, says Beinart, has often led the United States to become involved in international conflicts that proved to be far more challenging and complex than its leaders had initially realized. Particularly critical of the foreign policies of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush, Beinart argues each of these men harbored an exaggerated sense of confidence in what could be achieved by U.S. military power employed ostensibly for the promotion of democratic values. This misplaced confidence, Beinart explains, ultimately led those presidents to make bad decisions that left American troops mired in prolonged conflicts like the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. The necessary alternative, says Beinart, is to recognize the limits of American power and the need for a pragmatic foreign-policy approach based on multilateral cooperation and diplomacy rather than unilateral domination.

Founder & Editor of New Jewish-Themed Blog

In March 2012 Beinart became the founder and editor of Zion Square, a new Daily Beast blog that aimed to alter the “official Jewish discourse about Israel.” He later changed his blog’s name to Open Zion, but the project came to an end in December 2013.

Noting That Netanyahu Distrusted Obama

In May 2012, Beinart was quoted as having said: “[Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu distrusts [Barack] Obama because Obama reminds him of leftist Jews − the Jews that Netanyahu detests, the kind of Jews that Netanyahu once famously told an Israeli rabbi ‘have forgotten what it is to be Jews.’”

The Crisis of Zionism: Alleging Israel’s Betrayal of Demecratic Values

In 2012 as well, Beinart published The Crisis of Zionism, a book which expanded on the themes he had introduced in his earlier writings. Most notably, he argued that Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories and its maltreatment of Palestinians were incompatible with the country’s democratic values. The key themes discussed in the book include the following:

1. The Tension Between Zionism and Democracy: Beinart argues that in recent decades, Israel has abandoned its democratic principles by mistreating the Palestinian people — a development that poses a crisis for Zionism, a movement originally dedicated to Jewish self-determination and equality.
2. The Role of American Jews: Celebrating the fact that American Jews have recently become more critical of Israel because of its policies regarding Palestinians, Beinart exhorts American Jews to be more vocal in challenging Israel’s government and pushing for a two-state solution.
3. The Impact of the Occupation: Beinart contends that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is an unsustainable arrangement that undermines Israel’s democratic character while perpetuating inequality and violence.
4. The Settler Movement: Beinart views the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank as a major obstacle to peace in the Middle East and a challenge to the viability of a two-state solution.
5. Zionism’s Evolution: Beinart says that contemporary Zionism no longer comports with the values of equality and justice that were central to the movement’s founding.
6. The Role of the Israeli Government: Beinart argues that right-wing political figures like Benjamin Netanyahu have caused Israel to pursue policies like military occupation and settlement-building, that undermine peace efforts as well as Israel’s moral standing as a democratic state.
7. The Need for a New Zionist Vision: Beinart advocates a reimagining of Zionism in a manner that not only adheres to the original ideals of Jewish self-determination, but also promotes equality and justice for all people, including Palestinians.
8. The International Community’s Role: Beinaret contends that the United States, by means of its military aid and political support for Israel, has enabled the Jewish state to carry out what he views as a wide array of policies that oppress the Palestinian people. To rectify this situation, he urges the international community to hold Israel accountable for its actions.
9. The Two-State Solution: Throughout the book, Beinart promotes the notion that a two-state solution represents the most viable path to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Ties to the Anti-Semite, Rashid Khalidi

In early 2014 Beinart arranged for Rashid Khalidi, a notoriously anti-Semitic professor from Columbia University, to speak at Ramaz, an Orthodox Jewish high school in New York. When Ramaz administrators subsequently decided not to permit Rashidi to speak on their campus, Beinart complained: “What does it say about the administrators at Ramaz that after immersing their high-school students in a passionately Zionist environment for years and years, they lack the self-confidence to expose them to one lecture from a Palestinian?”

Accusing Israel of Pursuing “Permanent Occupation”

In a March 2015 opinion piece in Haaretz, Beinart called it “laughable” to suggest “that Israel is serious about creating a Palestinian state,” adding that “if Israelis have the right to vote for permanent occupation, we in the Diaspora have the right to resist it.” “Our principle” said Beinart, “should be this: Support any pressure that is nonviolent and consistent with Israel’s right to exist. That means backing Palestinian bids at the United Nations. It means labeling and boycotting settlement goods. It means joining and amplifying nonviolent Palestinian protest in the West Bank. It means denying visas to, and freezing the assets of, Naftali Bennett and other pro-settler leaders. It means pushing the Obama administration to present out its own peace plan, and to punish—yes, punish—the Israeli government for rejecting it.”

Downplaying the Oppression of Jews in Iran

In August 2015 Beinart tried to dismiss concerns about the level of oppression faced by Jews in Iran, declaring that while “Iran’s Jews are not free, neither is their government trying to kill them.” “Three-and-a-half decades after the Islamic Revolution,” he elaborated, “Iran boasts perhaps 60 functioning synagogues, along with multiple kosher butchers and Jewish schools.” But as the Iranian Jewish attorney Pooya Dayanim points out, Jews in Iran “suffer from official inferior status under Iranian Law and are not protected by police or the courts”; they are “barred from any position in which they would be superior to Muslims”; they “are excluded from most government positions”; they are subject to severe “limitations on educational opportunities”; and they face frightening “restrictions on private religious practice.”

Accusing Israel of Provoking Terrorism

In November 2015 Beinart delivered a speech to a Jewish congregation at a progressive Los Angeles synagogue in which he justified Palestinian terrorism, saying: “While we condemn Palestinian violence, we must recognize this painful truth: that Israeli policy has encouraged it. Israel has encouraged it by penalizing Palestinian nonviolence, by responding to that nonviolence by deportations, teargas, imprisonment, and the confiscation of Palestinian lands. Hard as it is to say, the Israeli government is reaping what it has sowed.”

Portraying Donald Trump as Anti-Muslim

After Republican Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential election of November 2016, Beinart posted a tweet stating that his annual holiday card that year would bear the caption: “Fuck You America.”

In a December 19, 2016 appearance on CNN, Beinart expressed his unease over the fact that President-elect Donald Trump was using language that framed the West’s conflict with Islamic terrorists as a “civilizational” war between “Islam and the West.” CNN host Don Lemon began the segment by quoting Trump’s response to that day’s Christmas-market terror attack in Berlin, in which a dozen people had been killed and dozens more injured by a jihadist at the wheel of a large truck. Said Lemon: “Donald Trump released a statement about the attack in Berlin saying, ‘ISIS and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad. These terrorists and their regional and worldwide networks must be eradicated from the face of the earth, a mission we will carry out with all freedom-loving partners.’  Then, in a statement about the shooting [by a jihadist] of the Russian ambassador [Andrey Karlov] in Turkey, [Trump] said the Russian ambassador was, quote, ‘assassinated by a radical Islamic terrorist.’” When Lemon then asked Beinart what he thought Trump’s “biggest challenge ahead in dealing with these kinds of attacks” would be, Beinart replied:

“Well, I think that the statement I think he made in response to the Berlin bombing [sic] is actually quite telling if you look at it. What’s fascinating is he never referred to the people who were killed as ‘German,’ only as ‘Christians.’ Actually, we don’t know the religion, as far as I know, of the people who were killed in that attack in Berlin. They were at a Christmas, you know, market, but lots of people go to that. Donald Trump’s description of that attack was basically civilizational. It was basically Islam attacking Christianity, and I think this gives you an insight into what he and people like Mike Flynn [Trump’s nominee for National Security Adviser] and Steve Bannon [Trump’s chief strategist and Senior Counselor] view this entire conflict is very dangerous. First of all, it essentially makes Muslims in the West seem like enemies within, and it makes it much harder to cooperate with Muslims against terrorism.”

Lemon then asked Beinart if he thought that Trump and his allies were engaging in “a coordinated strategy,” to which Beinart responded:

“Yeah, look, you go back all the way to the beginning of the campaign, you know, after the San Bernardino attacks [of December 2015], talking about not allowing Muslims in, saying that Muslims were cheering 9/11, the, you know, Flynn referring to Islam as a cancer. There’s been this entire thrust to essentially say this is a struggle between the West and Islam, which is exactly what ISIS wants. That’s the way ISIS describes it as well.”

 Changing Position on a Two-State Solution

Allied ideologically with the organization J Street, Beinart long supported a “two-state” solution in which an independent Palestinian nation would exist alongside Israel. But on July 8, 2020, he published an opinion piece in The New York Times titled, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.”  The piece opposes the continued existence of the Jewish state of Israel, and calls for a bi-national alternative instead.

Supporting Targeted Boycotts against Israel

Beinart has favored a selective, targeted boycott of goods produced by Israeli businesses that are situated in any of the disputed settlements of the West Bank—but not a boycott against Israel as a whole.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

In 2025, Beinart published his fourth book: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Said The New York Times Book Review: “For years, and at great personal cost, Beinart has been one of the most influential Jewish voices for Palestine…. He is sympathetic to the Jewish sense of vulnerability — he offers a granular accounting of the Hamas attacks — while nevertheless condemning the Israeli state…. Calmly and concisely, Beinart demolishes the usual defenses of Israel with reference to stories from within the Jewish tradition.”

Another review in MiddleEastEye.net said of Beinart’s book:

“After the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel began a project of annihilation in Gaza. Through indiscriminate and targeted attacks on homes, hospitals and refugee camps, along with the systematic denial of food, aid and medical supplies, large swathes of the Gaza Strip were reduced to rubble.

“In his new book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf), Beinart writes that he watched in horror as the destruction meted out on Palestinians in Gaza came with the consent of many Jews around the world. Conservative estimates put the Palestinian death toll close to 50,000, with tens of thousands more either missing, orphaned or maimed. ‘I’ve struggled with the way many Jews — including people I cherish — have justified the destruction of an entire society,’ he writes.

“The book … laments the purported reasons why so many American Jews have either ignored, justified or applauded (his words) as Gaza has endured a genocide over the past a year and a half…. It is also an appeal to his Jewish compatriots to reconsider their fanatical position on the state they cherish called Israel.”

Additional Information

Beinart has written articles and opinion pieces for many publications, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, The National Journal, Time, Newsweek, Slate, Reader’s Digest, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Daily Beast, The Forward, and Polity: The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Studies Association.

Beinart has served as a senior columnist for Haaretz (2014-2017), a political commentator for CNN, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (2007-2009).

In 2020, Beinart joined Jewish Currents as an editor-at-large.

The Week magazine named Beinart as “columnist of the year” for 2004.

In 2005, Beinart delivered the Theodore H. White Lecture at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Footnotes:

1. But as Israel Institute for Strategic Studies founder Martin Sherman notes: “This comparison is ludicrous. India has a population five times that of Pakistan spread over an entire subcontinent seven times the size of Pakistan. It is in no danger of annihilation from its impoverished eastern neighbor, even if it were to suffer a surprise first-strike that wiped out several of its population centers…. In stark contrast, Israel has a population less than one tenth and an area one eightieth of Iran’s [and thus would be essentially] wiped out by a single nuclear weapon.”

Additional Resources:

Peter Beinart Blames Israel For Ukraine’s Plight
By Hugh Fitzgerald
March 23, 2022