Background

Peter Beinart was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971. His parents were Jewish immigrants 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, the oldest and largest collegiate debate society in America. 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 publication, and from 1999-2006 he served as its editor. Since 2020, Beinart has been an Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

“A Fighting Faith”: 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 Win the War on Terror

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 claimed that the neoconservatives who had dominated U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 had egregiously mismanaged the War on Terror because of their arrogant and misguided belief in America’s ability to use military force to reshape the world as it wished. By Beinart’s reckoning, the Bush administration’s aggressive, unilateralist method of combating terrorism was precisely the wrong approach. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, for instance, was, by Beinart’s telling, a “disastrous mistake” that succeded only in making the world a more dangerous place and tarnishing America’s moral standing across the globe. The author argued that American liberals dedicated to a multilateral foreign-policy approach would be far better equipped to combat terrorism, as they would seek to address the root causes of extremism—such as political repression, poverty, and human-rights abuses—through diplomacy and financial assistance.

On June 1, 2006, The New Republic published the transcript of an interview during which 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.”

“The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”: A Failure to Criticize Israeli Depredations

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, a Jew, 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 only 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.”

Lecture Condemning Israel

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: The Consequences of American Hubris

Also in 2010, Beinart published a book titled 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 argued that the United States had often displayed a similar kind of hubris rooted in an unshakable sense of American exceptionalism, moral superiority, and invincibility. Such hubris, said Beinart, had frequently led the U.S. 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 claimed that 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 self-assuredness, Beinart explained, 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, said Beinart, was 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.

Beinart’s Anti-Israel 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.

Contempt for Benjamin Netanyahu

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: Denouncing Israel’s Maltreatment of the Palestinians

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 included the following:

1. The Tension Between Zionism and Democracy: Beinart argued that in recent decades, Israel had abandoned its democratic principles by mistreating the Palestinian people — a development that posed 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 had recently become more critical of Israeli policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians, Beinart exhorted 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 claimed that Israel was occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and that the alleged occupation undermined the Jewish state’s democratic character while perpetuating inequality and violence.
4. The Settler Movement: Beinart viewed the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank as a major obstacle to the viability of a two-state solution and peace in the Middle East.
5. Zionism’s Evolution: Beinart said that contemporary Zionism no longer comported with the values of equality and justice that were central to the movement’s founding.
6. The Role of the Israeli Government: Beinart argued that right-wing political figures like Benjamin Netanyahu had caused Israel to pursue policies like military occupation and settlement-building, thereby undermining peace efforts as well as Israel’s moral standing as a democratic state.
7. The Need for a New Zionist Vision: Beinart advocated a reimagining of Zionism in a manner that not only would adhere to the original ideals of Jewish self-determination, but would also promote equality and justice for the Palestinians.
8. The International Community’s Role: Beinart charged that the United States, by means of its military aid and political support for Israel, had enabled the Jewish state to carry out its oppressive policies. To rectify this situation, he urged America and the entire international community to hold Israel accountable for its actions.
9. The Two-State Solution: Throughout the book, Beinart promoted the notion that a two-state solution represented the most viable path to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Also in The Crisis of Zionism, Beinart lauded the terrorist organization Hamas for having recently “issued several new documents, which are more compatible with a two-state solution.”

Supporter of 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?”

Calling for Palestinian Boycotts & Resistance Against Israel

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.”

In October 2016, Beinart joined a number of fellow leftwing intellectuals and commentators in calling for a boycott of all Israeli-owned or Israeli-produced goods and services from Israeli-controlled territory in the disputed West Bank and Golan Heights and portions of Jerusalem.

Rationalizing & Justifying Palestinian 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.”

Whitewashing 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.”

Participant in NIAC Fundraiser

On February 27, 2016 at the Harvard Club of New York City, Beinart participated in a reception/fundraiser sponsored by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

Accusing Donald Trump of Islamophobia

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.”

Objecting to Claims That Palestinians Would Kill Jews Living in Palestinian Regions

During the December 29, 2016 broadcast of the CNN program New Day, former CIA Director James Woolsey said: “Israeli Arabs — that is, Muslim, usually, as citizens of Israel, about one-sixth of the Israeli population, can go to bed at night without fear that someone’s going to bash in their front door and kill them. … That sort of life is not possible for a Jew living in the West Bank, governed by the Palestinians. They will be killed. And if you even sell property to an Israeli, you’ll get killed.” Beinart later responded by saying: “The claim that Palestinians would inevitably kill Jews in the West Bank, I have Jewish friends, Israelis who live in the West Bank. It’s frankly a racist claim to suggest that Palestinians would inherently kill Jews.” “Some Palestinians commit terrorism and many don’t,” he added.

Giving up 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, Beinart published an opinion piece in The New York Times titled, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State” (and alternatively, “Why I Gave up on the Two-State Solution”).  The piece rejects the continued existence of the Jewish state of Israel and calls for a bi-national unitary state called “Israel-Palestine.” Some key excerpts:

“I was 22 in 1993 when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn to officially begin the peace process that many hoped would create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. I’ve been arguing for a two-state solution — first in late-night bull sessions, then in articles and speeches — ever since.

“I believed in Israel as a Jewish state because I grew up in a family that had hopscotched from continent to continent as diaspora Jewish communities crumbled. I saw Israel’s impact on my grandfather and father, who were never as happy or secure as when enveloped in a society of Jews. And I knew that Israel was a source of comfort and pride to millions of other Jews, some of whose families had experienced traumas greater than my own.

“One day in early adulthood, I walked through Jerusalem, reading street names that catalog Jewish history, and felt that comfort and pride myself. I knew Israel was wrong to deny Palestinians in the West Bank citizenship, due process, free movement and the right to vote in the country in which they lived. But the dream of a two-state solution that would give Palestinians a country of their own let me hope that I could remain a liberal and a supporter of Jewish statehood at the same time.

“Events have now extinguished that hope.

“About 640,000 Jewish settlers now live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Israeli and American governments have divested Palestinian statehood of any real meaning. The Trump administration’s peace plan envisions an archipelago of Palestinian towns, scattered across as little as 70 percent of the West Bank, under Israeli control. Even the leaders of Israel’s supposedly center-left parties don’t support a viable, sovereign Palestinian state. The West Bank hosts Israel’s newest medical school.

“If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fulfills his pledge to impose Israeli sovereignty in parts of the West Bank, he will just formalize a decades-old reality: In practice, Israel annexed the West Bank long ago.

“Israel has all but made its decision: one country that includes millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights. Now liberal Zionists must make our decision, too. It’s time to abandon the traditional two-state solution and embrace the goal of equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. It’s time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.

“Equality could come in the form of one state that includes Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, as writers such as Yousef Munayyer and Edward Said have proposed; or it could be a confederation that allows free movement between two deeply integrated countries. (I discuss these options at greater length in an essay in Jewish Currents). The process of achieving equality would be long and difficult, and would most likely meet resistance from both Palestinian and Jewish hard-liners.

“But it’s not fanciful. The goal of equality is now more realistic than the goal of separation. The reason is that changing the status quo requires a vision powerful enough to create a mass movement. A fragmented Palestinian state under Israeli control does not offer that vision. Equality can. Increasingly, one equal state is not only the preference of young Palestinians. It is the preference of young Americans, too.

“Critics will say binational states don’t work. But Israel is already a binational state. Two peoples, roughly equal in number, live under the ultimate control of one government. (Even in Gaza, Palestinians can’t import milk, export tomatoes or travel abroad without Israel’s permission.) And the political science literature is clear: Divided societies are most stable and most peaceful when governments represent all their people.

That’s the lesson of Northern Ireland. When Protestants and the British government excluded Catholics, the Irish Republican Army killed an estimated 1,750 people between 1969 and 1994. When Catholics became equal political partners, the violence largely stopped. It’s the lesson of South Africa, where Nelson Mandela endorsed armed struggle until Blacks won the right to vote.

That lesson applies to Israel-Palestine, too. Yes, there are Palestinians who have committed acts of terrorism. But so have the members of many oppressed groups. History shows that when people gain their freedom, violence declines. In the words of Michael Melchior, an Orthodox rabbi and former Israeli cabinet member who has spent more than a decade forging relationships with leaders of Hamas, ‘I have yet to meet with somebody who is not willing to make peace.’

“Rabbi Melchior recently told me that he still supports a two-state solution, but his point transcends any particular political arrangement: It is that Palestinians will live peacefully alongside Jews when they are granted basic rights. […]

“Israel-Palestine can be a Jewish home that is also, equally, a Palestinian home. And building that home can bring liberation not just for Palestinians but for us, too.”

Beinart jumped to the defense of Democrat U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib when the latter was widely criticized in late 2020 for having re-tweeted — in honor of “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” — a social media post that read, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” (Often used by terrorist groups that favor Israel’s destruction, this anti-Semitic slogan means that Palestinians should control all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which is precisely the territory where Israel is located.) “I get why many Jews find [the] slogan ‘Palestine from River to Sea’ frightening,” Beinart admitted. “Some have used it to disregard Jewish rights (1st Hamas charter, for instance). But @RashidaTlaib has been clear that Jews + Palestinians deserve equality. Suggesting otherwise is a smear.”

In a separate social medis post, Beinart wrote: “@RashidaTlaib supports 1 state where Jews + Palestinians live equally, under the same law,” he wrote. “Why is that less moral that the current 1 state: Where millions of Palestinians lack citizenship, due process, free movement + the right to vote for the govt that controls their lives?”

On August 26, 2022, The New York Times published a guest essay by Beinart titled “Has the Fight Against Antisemitism Lost Its Way?“, wherein he described Israel as an apartheid state and likened it to some of the world’s worst violators of human rights. Some key excerpts:

“Over the past 18 months, America’s most prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews.

“Last April, after Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of “the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” the American Jewish Committee claimed that the report’s arguments ‘sometimes border on antisemitism.’ In January, after Amnesty International issued its own study alleging that Israel practiced apartheid, the Anti-Defamation League predicted that it ‘likely will lead to intensified antisemitism.’ The A.J.C. and A.D.L. also published a statement with four other well-known American Jewish groups that didn’t just accuse the report of being biased and inaccurate, but also claimed that Amnesty’s report ‘fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on Earth.’

“Defenders of repressive governments often try to discredit the human rights groups that criticize them. A month before the A.J.C. accused Human Rights Watch of flirting with antisemitism, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times accused it of being “anti-China.” In 2019 a spokesman for Iran accused Amnesty of being “biased” against that country. In this age of rising authoritarianism, it’s not surprising that human rights watchdogs face mounting attacks. What’s surprising is that America’s most influential Jewish groups are taking part.

“For most of the 20th century, leading American Jewish organizations argued that the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle for universal human rights were intertwined. […] The historian Peter Novick has argued that after World War II, American Jewish organizations fought segregation because they believed that ‘prejudice and discrimination were all of a piece’ and thus Jewish groups ‘could serve the cause of Jewish self-defense as well by attacking prejudice and discrimination against Blacks as by tackling antisemitism directly.’

“Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate ‘antidemocratic practices and attitudes’ in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly ‘invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.’

“This began to change after the 1967 war. Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip made it master over roughly a million stateless Palestinians, which fueled anger at the Jewish state from leftists in the United States and around the world. At the same time, assimilation was leading many progressive American Jews to exit organized Jewish life, which left Jewish groups with a more conservative base as they searched for a new agenda now that civil rights for Black Americans had become law.

“The result was an ideological transformation. In 1974, two A.D.L. leaders wrote a book arguing that Jews were increasingly menaced by a ‘new antisemitism,’ directed not against individual Jews but against the Jewish state. Almost a half-century later, that premise now dominates mainstream organized American Jewish life.

“Largely as a result of lobbying by Jewish organizations, the American government has embraced the proposition, too. The State Department now employs a definition of antisemitism whose examples include opposing Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. […]

“Now that any challenge to Jewish statehood is met with charges of bigotry against Jews, prominent American Jewish organizations and their allies in the U.S. government have made the fight against antisemitism into a vehicle not for defending human rights but for denying them. Most Palestinians exist as second-class citizens in Israel proper or as stateless noncitizens in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 or live beyond Israel’s borders because they or their descendants were expelled or fled and were not permitted to return. But under the definition of antisemitism promoted by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the State Department, Palestinians become antisemites if they call for replacing a state that favors Jews with one that does not discriminate based on ethnicity or religion.

“But the campaign against antisemitism is being deployed to justify not merely the violation of Palestinian human rights. As relations have warmed between Israel and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, American officials have begun using the struggle against antisemitism to shield those regimes from human rights pressure, too.”

At daybreak on October 7, 2023 — which was the major Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah — the Islamic terror group Hamas carried out a massive, multi-front, surprise attack against Israel, firing thousands of rockets from Gaza into the Jewish state, while dozens of Hamas fighters infiltrated the Israeli border in a number of locations by air, land and sea. The attack had been planned in conjunction with officers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, along with agents of three other Iran-sponsored terrorist groups. “In an assault of startling breadth,” reported CBS News, “Hamas gunmen rolled into as many as 22 locations outside the Gaza Strip, including towns and other communities as far as 15 miles from the Gaza border. In some places they gunned down civilians and soldiers as Israel’s military scrambled to muster a response.” By October 8, at least 600 Israelis had been killed and 1,800 wounded, making it the bloodiest day Jews had experienced since the Holocaust. Moreover, Hamas took more than 240 Israelis hostage, including dozens who were American citizens, and moved them to the Gaza Strip. The terrorists also paraded Israelis’ mutilated bodies in Gaza, to cheering crowds of Palestinians. Ultimately, the official casualty toll in Israel reached more than 1,200 dead (including at least 32 Americans) and 4,500 injured. On October 27, 2023, the Israeli Defense Forces launched an invasion of the Gaza Strip with the stated aim of destroying Hamas and its leadership once and for all.

A week after the October 7 Hamas attacks, Beinart wrote an opinion piece published by The New York Times, titled “There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.” Likening Israel to apartheid-era South Africa, the author praised the African National Congress (ANC) for having successfully challenged apartheid through “ethical resistance” that “elicited international support” for sanctions in the 1980s. But he lamented that “when Palestinians [today] resist their oppression in ethical ways – by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law – the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.” “By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s,” Beinart argued, “American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path.” The principal form of “ethical resistance” that Beinart advocated as a weapon against Israel was the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative aiming to use various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and court rulings to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

Some additional key excerpts from Beinart’s piece:

• “The denial of Palestinian freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.”
• “Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an ‘open-air prison,’ penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never set foot in it.”
• “Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes ministers openly committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948.”
• “Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own.”
• “Israel, with America’s help, has … repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure.” 
• “After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the ‘occupation regime is more entrenched,’ Palestinians ‘question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.’”
• “As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.”
• “Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.”
• “The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it ‘too often veers into antisemitism.’ About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”

In January 2025, Beinart released his fourth book: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. A positive review of the book appeared in The Markaz Review, a publication whose stated mission is to “promot[e] a deeper understanding of the Arab/Muslim world” and its relationship with a wider “world fragmented by racism, gender discrimination, settler-colonialism, class and caste systems, xenophobia and orientalism.” Some noteworthy excerpts from the review:

“[Beinart’s] new book proposes [that] a single state that would balance equality for all citizens with a commitment to support the Palestinian and Jewish collectives within it. […]

“The primary task of Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning is [to serve as] an urgent appeal to [Beinart’s] fellow Jews to move past the all-consuming blindness induced by the trauma of October 7. The book is a cri de coeur, an expression of Beinart’s deep pain and exasperation that Jews have failed to acknowledge the monumental devastation and suffering that Israel has wrought in Gaza — which he has publicly described as a genocide. He maintains that long-standing Zionists, along with those newly fortified in their Zionist convictions after 10/7, have plunged themselves into a deep moral and political abyss. They have so sanctified the State of Israel as the defender of Jewish interests as to insist that any action it undertakes is, by definition, virtuous. […]

“In the Manichean world that [Beinart] describes, supporters of Israel see anything that the state does, including in Gaza in 2023-2024, as legitimate, and conversely, anything that Palestinians do in support of their quest for freedom as illegitimate and immoral. This includes not only different forms of armed resistance (for example, those that target civilians and those that do not) but also peaceful forms of protest (e.g., the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement). In the completely self-justifying worldview of pro-Israel advocacy, one can rationalize and justify every action that the state takes — up to and including gross violations of international humanitarian law — as morally valid and as a necessary response to the long history of persecution against Jews. Conversely, in such a world, one can easily occlude from vision the suffering and humanity of the other. […]

“While Beinart does not condone October 7 in any way, he does seek to understand the circumstances that prompted the day’s convulsion of violence. That is, he sees it as a result of decades of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestinians, which consistently foreclosed any viable path of non-violent protest. Consequently, he raises for discussion the sensitive question of the legitimacy of armed struggle.”

In February 2025, Jihad Watch contributing writer Hugh Fitzgerald addressed Beinart’s repeated assertions that Israel had long been “subjugating” the Palestinian people. Wrote Fitzgerald:

“What is the ‘actual subjugation’ of Palestinians by Israelis? In Gaza, there has not been a single Israeli in the Strip since 2005 — that is, until October 7, 2023 [when 250+ Israelis were kidnapped by Hamas terrorists]. In 2005, every Israeli was pulled out of Gaza. The Israelis left behind fourteen million dollars’ worth of greenhouses, in which fruit and flowers had been grown by Israelis and sold on the European market. The greenhouses were turned over intact by the Israeis to the Palestinians. The hope was that the Gazans would make good use of this turn-key operation. Instead the Palestinians trashed the greenhouses, pulled out the copper pipes, and left what had been a very profitable business in ruins. In Judea and Samaria, the Palestinians are left entirely alone to govern themselves in Area A, and in Area B are left alone by the Israelis except as to security matters, which remain in Israeli hands. Only in Area C are the Palestinians subject to a series of restrictions to prevent them from expanding onto state and waste lands, or even on land owned by Jews. In Israel itself, Israeli Arabs enjoy full civil and political rights. They sit in the Knesset, serve on the Supreme Court go abroad as diplomats representing the state. A recent head of Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, was an Israeli Arab. Jews and Arabs work in the same offices an on the same farms. They play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras. They are treated by the same medical personnel — consisting of both Jews and Arabs —in the same hospitals. Jews and Arabs go into business together, in everything from restaurants to high-tech start-ups. There is only one difference: Jews must, while Arabs may, serve in the military. Does any of this support Peter Beinart’s insistence that the Jews now ‘subjugate’ the Palestinians?”

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, Polity: the Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Studies Association, and The Daily Beast (where he was a senior political writer).

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.

Beinart has appeared as a guest on numerous television programs and stations, including, among others: NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, the Charlie Rose show, The McLaughlin Group, The Colbert Report, MTV, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.

Beinart has served as a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation.

From 2007-2009, Beinart was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2012, Beinart was included on Foreign Policy magazine’s list of “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” 

Beinart became a columnist for Haaretz beginning January 1, 2014.

Also in January 2014, Beinart became a contributing editor for the National Journal and The Atlantic.

In January 2017, Beinart left Haaretz and became a columnist for The Forward, where he stayed until January 2020, when he joined Jewish Currents as an editor-at-large.

Beinart has served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

In 2011, Beinart served as an advisory board member of Betselem, an anti-Israel non-governmental organization.

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