On Tuesday, I attended Peter Beinart’s talk on “Trump, Israel and the Future of American Democracy” at Tel Aviv University. The event was bittersweet for me. Beinart was one of my childhood heroes. When the majority of Israelis and Palestinians still supported two states for two peoples, he championed this aspiration with grace. I followed his writing in the Daily Beast during the height of the Kerry Initiative, and continued to read his Op-Eds in Haaretz until he left the newspaper in 2020. And then he wrote in Jewish Currents “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine.” Watching a rather gifted writer throw out any semblance of pragmatism in his politics was heartbreaking.

From a values perspective, it is hard to rebut the arguments he champions within his reimagined political identity. He supports many of his claims with reports written by human rights organizations and grounds his ethics within the ever-elusive goal of equality for all. He also expresses his views within the contemporary discourse of the global left. In his understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel is a settler-colonial entity, an apartheid state guilty of genocide; for everyone living on the land to achieve civic equality, Israeli Jews cannot be entrusted with national self-determination in a state of their own. It is easy to see his appeal amongst progressive college students.

However, he never offers a prescription........

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