Should Jews shun other Jews? And should they shun Jews who call on Jews to shun other Jews?
Peter Beinart’s call in the March 19 New York Times for a boycott of goods manufactured in West Bank settlements reignited a debate not just about what works and doesn’t when it comes to advancing a two-state solution, but also about what should and should not be said during the debate.
Beinart is a journalist and essayist whose book “The Crisis of Zionism” is about to come out. He tried to cast his call in pro-Israel terms.
“If Israel makes the occupation permanent and Zionism ceases to be a democratic project, Israel’s foes will eventually overthrow Zionism itself,” he wrote.
Beinart referred to his boycott proposal as “Zionist BDS” — a play on the pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement targeting all of Israel, which Beinart condemned in his essay as an effort to dismantle the Jewish state.
The pushback was immediate and came from multiple camps in the Israel debate: those who rejected Beinart’s thesis but sought to engage him, and those who think his latest call places him beyond the pale. More pushback came from advocates of a broader boycott movement targeting all of Israel.
Beinart has been a high-profile figure in debates over Israel since he penned a much-discussed 2010 essay in The New York Review of Books suggesting that what he depicted as an Israeli slide away from democratic values would alienate U.S. Jewish youth. The essay won plaudits from the pro-Israel left.
Beinart was scheduled to be a featured speaker the J Street national conference. But even the dovish J Street was cool to his proposal. Its president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said boycotting settlements was unlikely to yield positive results.
“We favor a border, not a boycott. We want to get the political process going to arrive at a border,” he said.
Ben-Ami hastened to note, however, that the idea of boycotting settlements was not out of place in Israeli discourse. Amos Oz, the widely respected Israeli novelist, has signed a letter supporting Israeli artists who refuse to perform in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
Seth Mandel, writing on the Contentions blog at the conservative Commentary magazine, assailed Beinart’s proposal and his labeling of Israel proper as “democratic Israel” and Israeli settlements as “nondemocratic Israel.” Mandel called these arguments “both morally reprehensible and a dangerous slippery slope.”
“The slippery slope, of course, is that the ‘legitimate’ vs. ‘illegitimate’ argument will immediately be applied to those, anywhere and anytime, who voice any support for the Jews Beinart says to stay away from,” Mandel wrote.
Jeffrey Goldberg is a writer for The Atlantic who also has criticized the West Bank settlement enterprise. He chose to discuss with Beinart in a much-watched exchange on Twitter.
“What’s your alternative for stopping the settlement growth that dooms Israeli democracy?” Beinart asked Goldberg.
Goldberg replied: “Longer discussion, but int’l boycott will only make mainstream Israelis more sympathetic to settlers, not less.”
“I don’t think a JCRC would support any organization that would support any kind of activity that would bring any harm to a segment of Israel,” said Ronald Halber, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.
David Harris, the American Jewish Committee’s executive director, said that questions of whether Beinart was in or out of the discussion were rendered moot by the welcome Beinart received in venues like The New York Times — and that meant he would continue to score speaking gigs from Jewish groups.
Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, said Beinart’s proposal would alienate Israelis and so violated a basic tenet of first heeding what another Jewish community was considering before recommending action.
One Jewish group, Americans for Peace Now, which is a member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, announced its backing for settlement boycotts last July.
The debate is sure to continue, if only because Beinart was stoking it at the virtual meeting place he hosts at the Daily Beast/Newsweek. The newly launched blog, called Zion Square, has assembled an array of prominent contributors, predominantly hailing from the left of the political spectrum.
One of Zion Square’s writers, Raphael Magarik, chided those who said Jews boycotting Jews should be out of bounds. He noted that such actions have been commonplace throughout Jewish history.
“To cut from our playbook the best tactic Jews have for censuring other Jews, a tactic that dates at least to the Talmud and has as its targets the likes of Leon Trotsky, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Baruch Spinoza — well, that’s what I call painful and unnatural,” he wrote.
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