Why Shouldn't Peter Beinart Be Discomforted?

Peter Beinart is a professor at CUNY's Graduate Center located at 365 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Or an Associate Professor.  His best course seems to be Opinion Writing.

He is not an unfamiliar person to my readers (although as he banned me from his Twitter account, I lost track of some of his output).

In any case, according to IfNotNow back in early 2015, they understood a piece he wrote as being an

Important piece...encouraging the Jewish community to welcome discomfort

That piece from January 5 was headlined

 the Palestinians won't gain freedom on their knees.

and it contained this final paragraph:

It would be wonderful if Palestinians could win those freedoms without causing Jews discomfort. But it hasn't happened that way because it never happens that way. People are not given freedom; they take it. What matters is not what the goyim say, said David Ben-Gurion, but what the Jews do. Mahmoud Abbas is finally taking that maxim to heart. Hes tired of relying on the benevolence of Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama. He's doing it the Zionist way.

Let's be clear: the Arabs-called-Palestinians were given an all-Arab country in 1922, TransJordan, in which Jewish settlement was prohibited (and the British stemmed any attempt by Jews to purchase land there even when the Emir Abdallah wished to sell it, as some of his countrymen managed to do, surreptisiously).

That was not enough.  They rejected, from the start, Jewish national rights. No Jewish People, not immigration rights, no settlement rights and not a Jewish Homeland.

As a result of Arabs-called-Palestinian's terror in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936, and during the intervening years as well, and following hundreds of Jewish dead, thousands injured and raped and maimed with property loss and ethnic cleansing from their homes in several locations, the British suggested a Partition Plan in 1937.

The Arabs refused it.

The 1939 White Paper, an illegal policy action, did away with the idea of a Jewish National Home as enshrined in the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference decision and that of the League of Nations and set out that

The objective of His Majesty's Government is the establishment within 10 years of an independent Palestine State...with a view to the termination of the Mandate...[that] independent State should be one in which Arabs and Jews share government

And they rejected the 1947 UN Partition recommendation.

Despite no "occupation" of Judea, Samaria and Gaza between 1948-1967 and not one Jewish settlement constructed there at the time (it was occupied by Jordan and Egypt), the Arab terror continued in the form of the fedayeen and from 1964, the PLO/Fatah.

Given all this, I find his penultimate paragraph there subversive if not irrational and surely immoral as well as deliberately, I think, justifying violence:

As a liberal, I want the Palestinians to demand nonviolently. As a Zionist and a pragmatist, I want them to demand a state alongside Israel, not in its place. But as a Jew who this week begins reading the Book of Exodus – which calls us to remember the heart of the stranger – I cannot deny the Palestinians right to demand the same freedoms that we demand for ourselves. And I cannot ask them to wait.

That was three years ago.  In 2017, even the +972 radical progressive site was disturbed by Beinart's thinking.  Extremist Tom Pessah wrote:

In a well intentioned column in The Forward this week, titled “IfNotNow Is The Jewish Black Lives Matter,” Jewish American journalist Peter Beinart is creating divisions precisely where alliances are needed. Not principled divisions, but divisions resulting from a lack of sensitivity and awareness of his own privilege. (IfNotNow issued a response to the piece, and INN’s Philadelphia chapter put out a statement of their own.)

In the article, Beinart, who deserves credit for compellingly broadening the conversation about Israel within the Jewish American community, sets out to highlight activist groups pressuring the Jewish establishment to end its complacency with the occupation. 

In IfNotNow's response noted, they quite forthrightly declared

IfNotNow is a movement to end the American Jewish community’s support for the occupation.

The strategy was, and is, identical; tactics could differ as they clarified there:

Beinart’s writing is and has been a source of inspiration and insight for many of us. We write about the ways his piece missed the mark in the spirit of intellectual inquiry and public challenging of our community to do better

He has been pushing IfNotNow constantly as in this July 2017 example:

what gives me hope that the American Jewish community will one day defend freedom and justice for Israelis and Palestinians, rather than defending Benjamin Netanyahu, I answer: “If Not Now.” A Millennial-powered movement, speaking in an authentically Jewish idiom, which challenges American Jewish leaders to meet the moral responsibilities of power, is exactly what American Jewry needs

Today, IfNotNowers were in Manhattan, saying Kaddish for Arabs-called-Palestinians, 80% of them Hamas members, shot and killed by the IDF as they attempted to crash through Israel's post-disengagement border opposite Gaza and otherwise commit violence of various sorts.  The day before they shut down briefly the Israel Consulate in Boston.

I don't mind anti-Jewish establishment demos.  Been there, done that.

But what irks and bothers me, and yes, even disappoints me, is that these youngsters cannot think (one of them really has a hard time reciting the Kaddish), do not know history and have been corrupted as to what is Zionism on the one hand, and, on the other, what is Palestinianism, by people like Beinart.  He let the genie out of the bottle. He is not alone but he takes the credit.

I think Beinart should feel some discomfort.  He's discomforted Jews in Hebron, after all.  Non-violent discomfort. The discomfort he pushes but not the "Palestinian way".

___________

Reminder of non-success of non/anti-Zionists.


^