Charges of antisemitism have become a weapon wielded by “influential” Jewish organizations against critics of Israel, far-left commentator and author Peter Beinart has argued in a deeply flawed article in the New York Times.
The article, titled, “Has the fight against Anti-Semitism lost its way?”, also espouses the “apartheid” label of Israel by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, a designation that has been refuted even from within the rights groups themselves, most recently by Amnesty‘s Israel director who described it as a “punch in the gut.”
Beinart compares Israel with some of the world’s worst violators of human rights, including Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia.
Israeli journalist Gidon Ben-Zvi debunked the assertions put forward in the op-ed and called the Times to task for publishing the article without fact-checking.
“[W]hile Peter Beinart is entitled to his bizarre opinions, he’s not entitled to his own facts,” writes Ben-Zvi. “There are several points where The New York Times, as the publisher of the opinion piece, should have amended gross inaccuracies stated by Beinart about Israel.”
Beinart relies on an outrageous report accusing Israel of apartheid that has since been discredited. He wrote:
Most Palestinians exist as second-class citizens in Israel proper or as stateless noncitizens in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 or live beyond Israel’s borders.
But under the definition of antisemitism promoted by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the State Department, Palestinians become antisemites if they call for replacing a state that favors Jews with one that does not discriminate based on ethnicity or religion.
As Ben-Zvit notes, Israel is a country where its Arabs, or Palestinian citizens of Israel – as Beinart refers to them — serve as Supreme Court justices, fighter pilots, Members of Knesset, artists, athletes.
“So when Palestinians call for “replacing a state,” as Beinart writes, they are in reality advocating for the liquidation of a country whose legislation and court system have combatted any manifestation of discrimination — with the goal of guaranteeing equal rights for all,” Ben-Zvi maintains.
In fact, Israel is ranked above Italy, Spain, and the United States in a global index of democratic values.
Beinart also notes the plight of Palestinians who live in the Palestinian territories but fails to mention that their suffering is also due to the fact that they choose despot leaders – at best – and terror leaders at worst. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who governs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, is practically a dictator while the Hamas terror group in Gaza chooses to invest all its money in terror activities against Israel.
Beinart refers to the 1967 Six Day War as a “conquest” after which Israel was “master over roughly a million stateless Palestinians.”
But as Ben-Zvi notes, the war was a defensive one after the armies from Israel’ neighbors, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, attacked Israel with a single goal in mind: to annihilate the Jewish state.
Iran is conspicuously absent from the piece – apart from a brief reference to it as another human rights violator. Beinart conveniently forgot to mention its nuclear aspirations or its declared vision of destroying Israel and its funding of Palestinian terrorist groups.
“By not editing Peter Beinart’s piece more diligently, The New York Times’ own objectivity and ability to distinguish fact from anti-Israel fictional narratives is called into question” Ben-Avi concludes.
In 2020, Beinart, who is Jewish, came under fire for publishing an article — once again in the New York Times — calling for the end of the Jewish state.
The ridiculous op-ed entitled “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State,” called for Israel to be replaced with a binational, unitary state called “Israel-Palestine.”