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Left wing or right im pro violence8/2/2023 ![]() ![]() On Friday, a ceasefire agreement, brokered by Egypt, put a stop to the violence, at least temporarily. Mobs attacked civilians, or police, or, in one case, a news crew of the public broadcaster. There were other incidents, in Ramla and Hebron. In Bat Yam, a mob of Jewish extremists beat an Arab motorist whom they had pulled from a car, an incident captured by an Israeli news crew. ![]() The city’s mayor called for a state of emergency, saying that the country was on the brink of a civil war. In Lod, a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israeli Arab protesters threw stones and set fires at a Jewish school, a synagogue, and other businesses a Jewish man was killed when he was hit by a rock while driving, and an Arab Israeli was shot to death. The crisis began in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, over a court case which threatened the eviction of six Palestinian families, but it spread not just outward, to the skies and to the occupied territories, but inward, to Israel’s mixed cities. “They’re still my people.”Įven by Israeli standards, the latest escalation of hostilities has taken place across an unusually intimate geography. “They can hate me if they want,” he told me. “He said, ‘If Beinart’s going to be there, and you want me to not withdraw, you’ve gotta insure that I never lay eyes on him.’ Literally I was such a turnoff that people wouldn’t come.” Beinart became slightly sentimental. Eventually Beinart learned that someone had raised an alarm. Another year, a book of Beinart’s was published, in which he detailed what he saw as a crisis within Zionism. It’s fabulous.” At one event, there were rumors that Ivanka Trump was present. All people do is pray, and eat, and talk about what they’re gonna eat,” Beinart said. “And like a complete idiot, I thought, ‘Oh, yes, how nice of you to recognize me.’ ” The man said, “Your politics are shit.”įor a couple of years, Beinart had been a scholar-in-residence at a Passover program-elaborate affairs in which mostly Orthodox Jews travel to hotels in places like the Yucatán or Whistler that have been rented for the occasion, with lectures and religious ceremonies. ![]() ![]() One day not too long ago, he was walking to shul when a man came up to him and asked if he was Peter Beinart. Within this community he is a better fit religiously than politically. Because he is saying Kaddish for his father, an anti-apartheid South African Jew, who died not long ago, Beinart visits a synagogue twice a day, and spends an hour each morning studying the Talmud. He looks similar to how he did when he first became a public figure, around the turn of the century-the same close-cropped black hair, smooth skin, and wide-set features-and he’s retained the earnest, slightly formal manner of a person who has been debating very serious matters from a very young age. Peter Beinart had switched sides.īeinart, who turned fifty this year, has lived for a decade within a well-defined Orthodox Jewish community on the Upper West Side. No one involved in these debates missed the implication: the most influential liberal Zionist of his generation no longer believed in an exclusively Jewish state in the Middle East. “If Palestinians have no right to return to their homeland,” he wrote, “neither do we.” Two days later, Rashida Tlaib, the left-wing Palestinian congresswoman, quoted Beinart when she led several of her progressive colleagues to the floor of the House to denounce Israel’s latest actions. On May 11th, as violence escalated in Israel and Gaza, Beinart published a second essay, arguing that the Jewish right to return home should also apply to Palestinians. He called on interested parties to work toward a single state in the Middle East that would protect the rights of Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike. “The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades-a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews-has failed,” Beinart wrote, in a long essay for Jewish Currents. Having made his name as a stalwart of liberal Zionism and a prominent center-left supporter of the Iraq War, both as an editor of The New Republic and a familiar face on cable news, Beinart has spent much of the past decade reconsidering those positions. In the fights over the future of Israel and Palestine, in which enmities are often understood to be both ancient and eternal, Peter Beinart is the rare figure to have come unstuck. ![]()
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