VIOLENCE, NOT VOICES

RAPE? BEHEADINGS? MASS MURDER? JUSTIFIED. TALKING? HELL NO.

Peter Beinart learns a hard lesson about choosing dialogue over violence.

In the past couple of years, the American writer and commentator Peter Beinart has veered from thoughtful critic of Israeli policy to part of the whackadoodle throng, becoming an anti-Zionist crank.

Beinart’s transformation may be a genuine ideological shift. Or it may be the desperate tack of a self-interested and entrepreneurial writer playing to the algorithmic lowest common denominator.

In any event, he slouched to new lows recently.

Beinart gave a speech at Tel Aviv University last week, despite having long ago jumped on the whole boycott-Israel extravaganza, saying that his visit to the campus was an opportunity to communicate his anti-Israel views to Israelis.

His comrades in the hate-Israel hordes were having none of it. They were outraged.

In a groveling apology on X, Beinart crawled across cut glass, asserting that he had “let my desire for that conversation override my solidarity with Palestinians.”

“I wanted to say certain things to an Israeli audience. Speaking at Tel Aviv University seemed to offer that chance,” he wrote. “It’s embarrassing to admit such a serious mistake.”

That’s not the embarrassing part, Pete.

“I dearly wish I had not made this one,” he continued, “which has caused particular harm because international pressure is crucial to ensuring Palestinian freedom. This was a failure of judgment. I am sorry.”

Beinart, who is (scarily) a journalism professor at the City University of New York, carried on in this fashion for a while, but it did little to assuage the howler monkeys of the anti-Israel zoo, who were in no mood to forgive.

Condemnation of Beinart was predictably hysterical, as is so often the case in the hyperbolic chamber of anti-Zionism (See: “genocide,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and so on and so forth.).

“Palestinians condemn Peter Beinart’s event at complicit Tel Aviv University in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, posted on X. “Whitewashing genocide can never be reconciled with any claim to humanism or moral consistency.”

(Note to self: Coin a term that is the opposite of “whitewashing” to describe the slandering of a people with false allegations like “genocide” and then accusing them of high crimes when they refuse to bow down before the naked emperor.)

See the Times of Israel story for even more of the self-righteous indignation from Beinart’s “friends.”

Before his ill-fated campus visit, Beinart posted on X that he chose to speak “because I want to reach Jews who disagree with me — because I believe that by trying to convince Jews to rethink their support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, I can contribute, in some very small way, to the struggle for freedom and justice.”

Silly Peter, thinking dialogue was still a thing.

Oh, we don’t think so, declared the genocide-jockeys. Suffice to say, these are not the kind of friends who forgive and forget.

The bigger lesson from Beinart’s folly is that it illustrates magnificently the core tenet of anti-Zionism, which is the refusal to engage in any way at all with the detested “Zios.”

It is one of many antisemitic premises of anti-Zionism that Jews can argue you into a pretzel, that you can’t beat those people at their own game: debating. Therefore, while the basis of all progressive ideologies is that talking is the answer to all the world’s problems, that doesn’t apply to this problem. No matter the conflict — interpersonal or international — the answer, accepted by liberals and correct-thinking people everywhere, is always dialogue, conciliation, discussion, interchange, diplomacy.

Except when you’re dealing with Jews, when force, even violence, is the only tactic in the toolbox.

Put mildly, this is a betrayal of pretty much everything else self-declared “liberals” like Beinart claim to endorse.

It is not, as the writer Nathan Thrall unconvincingly argues in his book, that force is The Only Language They Understand. Rather, it is the racist assumption that, since you can’t beat a Jew in an argument, violence is the only thing that will work on them. (I rather convincingly dispatched this misapprehension, if I say so myself, in my recent post Muscular Judaism. Tl;dr: If you think Jews can’t physically defend themselves because they are thinky, you’ll find out soon enough that they’ve learned to fight on their enemies’ playing field too. So FAFO.)

Despite this, the assumption remains that, since you can’t best the Jews in a debate, it’s best to blow them up. (I summarize.) Better yet, since we know the Jews love to argue, by refusing to engage, it’s kind of like the old joke about the masochist who says “Hurt me, hurt me” and the sadist says, “No.” But anyways.

Of course, Beinart is also a Jew. But this might be proof of my theory, rather than a point of debunking. He thought he could debate a bunch of Zios but his Pali pals said Oh no you won’t and so he had to do what Jews have had to do across the centuries: Prostrate themselves before their persecutor.

Until Zionism, of course, which ended that sad little burlesque — for everyone except the anti-Zionist Jews, like Beinart, who perpetuate the ancient ritual humiliation of their ancestors by kowtowing to the bigots. (Tradition! as that walking stereotype Tevye said.) Zionists have had quite enough of that, thank you very much. (Again, if you haven’t yet, read my piece on Muscular Judaism.)

Leaving aside the foul reality that Beinart is actually teaching the next generation of journalists at one of America’s leading colleges, the bigger issue, again, is that the Israel-bashers have as their core M.O. the refusal to talk. In every other issue, involving every other people, talking is the answer to all the world’s problems.

Except the, umm, Jewish problem.

Which brings me to one of my fave quotes of all time. I must invoke this conservatively because I could literally inject this brilliance from Jean-Paul Sartre into practically every one of my posts:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

Like every other part of the “pro-Palestinian” strategy, discussion is not a means to an end or a possible tool to use (or forbid) to reach a desired outcome. It is, above all, a sharp stick with which to poke the Jews.

You want a debate? Nope. Not playing on your field. We’ll shout slogans, stomp our feet, blow up buses and, if one of our people dares to so much as say boo to a Zio, we will chase them out of the tent so fast they’ll be backpedalling on X quicker than Evelyn Wood can read.

The most remarkable thing is that, after October 7, we saw that people were able to justify rape, beheadings, live immolations, mass murder and other atrocities.

The only thing that crosses the line?

Dialogue.

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