Peter Beinart deserves credit for continually testing how big the Jewish tent really is. His new and controversial proposal for a targeted boycott of products from Israeli settlements in the contested West Bank is only the latest case in point.
The tent is a euphemism for acceptable discourse in the often fractious conversation about Israel among American Jews. We don't merely argue about the fraught issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We argue about who has the right to argue about it.
Beinart is an intellectual wunderkind: a member of the debating society at Yale University, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, youngest editor ever at the New Republic and so on. In 2010, he created quite a stir with his essay describing the tensions between liberalism and Zionism, and faulting the American Jewish establishment for alienating so many younger Jews. The essay turned into a book, The Crisis of Zionism, and one recommendation in the book turned into an opinion piece in the New York Times.
Hello, book sales. Hello, controversy. (Or perhaps the order should be reversed.)
In the opinion piece, Beinart promotes what he calls "Zionist BDS", arguing that the controversial movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel (BDS) ought to be targeted at only the territories beyond the Green Line – the area captured by Israel in 1967 that should make up a new Palestinian state or, in Beinart's words, "non-democratic Israel". He uses that language to distinguish the oppressive conditions suffered by the Palestinians from the flawed but genuine democracy enjoyed by Israeli citizens of any background, and to distinguish the Palestinians from the more than 300,000 Jewish settlers who benefit from subsidies, roads and all sorts of special protection from the Israeli government.
Beinart's proposal is not a brand new idea. Some writers and artists in Israel and the US have refused to perform at a cultural center in Ariel, a large settlement on the West Bank; other leftwing organizations have advocated boycotting products manufactured in the settlements as a way to express disagreement with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
But some of the pushback to Beinart's idea – and it caused a round of heavily punctuated fury on Twitter – is driven, I think, by thinly-disguised jealousy. Beinart has a knack for capturing a certain sentiment and, by giving it the intellectual grounding it might otherwise have lacked, he has launched the idea into the mainstream.
Personally, I think his version of "Zionist BDS" is both impractical and dangerous for Israel. As the Forward has reported, the practical effects of this type of targeted boycott may be no more than a dramatic, empty gesture. Americans bought $21bn-worth of goods from Israel in 2010, and the vast, vast majority of those items came from Israel proper. There is little manufacturing on the West Bank, little to export. Simply refraining from purchasing Ahava skin lotion or Gush Etzion wine will hardly make a dent in Israel's impressive economy.
Indirect boycott and divestment from companies engaged in the West Bank are complicated to unravel and just about impossible to enforce. Such is the nature of life on either side of the Green Line. Just as the security barrier tracing Israel's temporary perimeter is a thick, high wall in some places and looks like a porous backyard fence in others, so, too, the border delineating occupied territory is sometimes heavily barricaded and other times barely discernible.
So, beyond the dangerous optics of Beinart's proposal – its implicit support of a broader BDS movement, its unwillingness to engage settlers or make demands of Palestinians – there is also the simple impracticality of the idea.
What Beinart has accomplished, though, is to pinpoint a deep frustration and confusion on the part of many Jews who want to stop the peace process from unraveling and who wish to see and end to the occupation that leaves Israel's security intact. This is the constituency of Jewish opinion that wants to reclaim the high moral ground in the struggle for Israel's democratic soul.
For that reason, he and his ideas – no matter how outrageous, no matter how self-serving – deserve a place inside the tent. He asks an uncomfortable, difficult, yet essential question: if well-meaning American Jews who love Israel believe that the occupation of Palestinian land and people is detrimental and wrong, what are those Jews to do?
Front Page Features