Israel has no right to exist, New York Times “contributing opinion writer” Peter Beinart writes in a new opinion article accusing “mainstream American Jewish life” of being idolatrous.
The article appears under a general-purpose headline: “States Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People Do.” Yet after a bit of throat-clearing and hypothetical speculation about Scotland, Britain, Iran, and China, Beinart gets down to making his case for eliminating Israel, or, as he delicately puts it, “rethinking the character of the state” by replacing Israel with something else.
The one country that Beinart is really determined to rethink just happens to be the only one with a Jewish majority. The URL or web address that the Times team gives the article also exposes the game, “https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/opinion/israel-state-jewish.html.”
This isn’t some sort of abstract political theory philosophy project — it’s an effort by Beinart, platformed by the New York Times, to wipe the Jewish state off the map. At this point, it’s predictable and tired. Beinart had already announced in the New York Times back in 2020, “I no longer believe in a Jewish state,” part of what earned him the status of the New York Times‘ most favorite Jew.
So what, if anything, is new in this latest Beinart screed? Beinart has a new book to publicize, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. It is issued by publisher Knopf, whose parent company, Bertelsmann AG, collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and subsequently covered it up.
As is often the case with hatred of Israel, Beinart’s article is marred by factual errors. He claims that “roughly half the people under Israeli control are Palestinian.” That’s simply false; Israel’s population is about 9.8 million, of which about 7.2 million, or 73 percent, are Jewish, according to Israel’s central bureau of statistics. Beinart’s math depends on defining people in Palestinian Authority-controlled Ramallah and Jenin, or in Hamas-controlled Gaza, as being “under Israeli control,” which is not accurate.
Beinart also falsely claims, “Even the minority of Palestinians under Israeli control who hold Israeli citizenship — sometimes called ‘Israeli Arabs’ — lack legal equality.” Just because a group suffers from discrimination or has lower achievement doesn’t mean it lacks legal equality. Israel’s Declaration of Independence states, “It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture.” Israel’s Supreme Court has enforced that promise of equality. Israeli Arabs have the right to vote and serve in the Parliament. An Israeli Arab politician, Mansour Abbas, even recently served as a minister in an Israeli government.
Beinart also complains that “this form of idolatry — worship of the state — seems to suffuse mainstream American Jewish life.” That’s not true. Yes, most mainstream American Jews — unlike Beinart and, apparently, his New York Times editors — care deeply about Israel and oppose the enemies that hope to eradicate it. Yet the comparison to idolatry is inaccurate. It’s also inconsistent with Beinart’s previous claims. Already in his 2012 book The Crisis of Zionism, or even before that in his 2010 article “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” Beinart was predicting that American Jews would abandon Israel as it became, he claimed, more illiberal and right wing and undemocratic. Now, more than a decade later, he’s accusing American Jews not of abandoning Israel but of worshiping it. At least with his reference to “mainstream Jewish life” Beinart is defining himself clearly outside that. Given that, one wonders why the New York Times has chosen to rely so heavily for analysis of American Jewry and Israel on such an extremist, fringe figure.
I offered a couple of theories last year, including that “some portion of the Times online readership — alienated graduate students and other young, college educated liberals, along with increasing numbers of non-Americans — are looking for someone to give them a pass to hate Israel, basically to excuse their antisemitism. Beinart serves that function.”
In that regard, a Times colleague of Beinart’s offers some useful analysis. In a 2012 review for Tablet of a Beinart book, Bret Stephens, then still at the Wall Street Journal, paraphrased Leon Wieseltier’s observation “that characterizing antisemitic acts as a response to something Jews did doesn’t explain antisemitism. It reproduces it.”
