Tag: Peter Beinart

Being in Egypt: When Jews Were a Demographic Time Bomb

From the Haggadah: And they did us evil, those Egyptians. They made us seem malevolent, as it is written: Behold, the nation of the children of Israel has become too many and too massive for us. Let us find a solution for this before they further multiply. Two points. First, the evil that the Egyptians did to the Jews was to construe them as malevolent, as wicked. Second, their wickedness consisted in becoming a massive nation within a nation. The Egyptians understood the wickedness of the Jews, in other words, by virtue of the demographic challenge they posed to the Egyptian nation. I’m not big on readings of the Haggadah that seek to extract contemporary political instruction from the text. […]

Peter Beinart Speaks Truth About BDS

Peter Beinart is a liberal Zionist, a firm believer in the State of Israel, and a staunch critic of BDS. And this is what he has to say in Haaretz: But the tactical brilliance of BDS becomes clearer with every passing month. At a time when their leaders are bitterly divided and their people are geographically fragmented, BDS has united Palestinians like nothing else in recent memory. For the many young Palestinians fed up with both Fatah and Hamas, it offers a form of political action untainted by corruption, theocracy, collaboration and internal repression….And by relying on international activists—not Palestinian politicians—it universalizes the Palestinian struggle… But there’s one more factor that makes BDS so tactically shrewd: It exploits the mendacity […]

A Very Elite Backlash

The speed and scale of the backlash against the ASA boycott have been formidable. But the backlash has a curious feature: it is a very elite backlash, as this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education makes clear. It is spearheaded almost entirely by university presidents (not exactly my go-to sources of moral instruction on academic freedom), government officials, and institutional actors like the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities. If you want to understand the sources of that elite backlash, particularly among university presidents, Bard College President Leon Botstein—by no means a progressive on this issue—breaks it down in that Chronicle piece. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and a boycott opponent, said calls from alumni […]

Jews Without Israel

In shul this morning, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi spoke at length about the State of Israel. This is more surprising than you might think. I’ve been going to this shul since I moved to Brooklyn in 1999, and if memory serves, it’s only been in the last two or three years that the rabbi has devoted at least one of her High Holy Days talks to Israel. Throughout the aughts, Israel didn’t come up much in shul. During flash points of the Second Intifada, you might hear a prayer for Jewish Israelis or nervous temporizing about some action in Jenin or Gaza. But I can’t recall an entire sermon devoted to the State of Israel and […]

Why Did Liberals Support the Iraq War?

In September 2005, on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, The Nation ran a long piece I did on liberal support for the Iraq War and for US imperialism more generally.  By way of Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens, and Peter Beinart—as well as Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty—it addressed what I thought and still think are some of the deeper political and intellectual roots of the liberals’ support for the Iraq War. On the tenth anniversary of the War, I thought I might reprint that essay here. Some things I got wrong (Beinart, for example, went onto have something of a turnabout on these issues; it wasn’t Oscar Wilde but Jonathan Swift who made that jibe). Other issues I […]