My Turn to Weigh In on Peter Beinart: What's with His Hero-Worship of an Anti-Israel South African Marxist?

This commentary was written over a week ago, but sat on an editor's desk. Here is the liberated column:

Commentators and analysts are still writing about Peter Beinart’s New York Review of Books essay on the Failure of the American Jewish Establishment and the subsequent essays Love Israel? Criticize It and Why Israel Has to Do Better. The J Street-walkers tout his pieces as proof of the justice and righteousness of their ways. The Zionist, traditional supporters of Israel see Beinart as ignoring the Arab/Iranian threats and the Palestinian incitement, and they decry as unfair his one-sided blaming of Israel for the Middle East’s woes.

I share many of those criticisms, for it is clear to me that Beinart’s view of Israel is not necessarily myopic; it is microscopic. From afar, he focuses intensely on an event or a person in Israel’s history and projects that speck as representative of all of Israel or its government or its leadership here and now. By definition, such a view is distorted. Thus Prime Minister Netanyahu’s old opposition to Palestinian statehood is presented as contemporary, and Shas’ Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef and Yisrael Beitenu party leader Avigdor Lieberman’s pre-election party platforms are portrayed as the same positions held in the coalition government today. It would be as if someone calls President Barack Obama today a lackey to the Jewish lobby because he stated as candidate just two years ago that Jerusalem must “remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

The biased Israeli authorities quoted by Beinart such as Ha’aretz’ Akiva Eldar or academic Ze’ev Sternhell are held with the same esteem in Israel as Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. What Beinart sees from there – or what he chooses to see – is not the same that we see and experience here in Israel.

I once met Beinart at the Chabad Center in Washington. I was truly impressed by his brilliance, confidence, and breadth of knowledge. And I was proud that he was unserer – one of us, and a self-proclaimed Orthodox Jew, no less.

But I forgot that not all Orthodox Jews are unserer. I certainly have little in common with the Haredi, ultra-Orthodox members of the fringe Neturei Karta who meet and express solidarity with Iran’s Ahmadinejad and pray for Israel’s demise. Their creed, dogma and rebbes are not mine.

And frankly, I am sorry to say, Peter Beinart’s dogma and rebbes are not mine, either. I thank Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg for sharing Beinart’s ani ma’amin – his set of basic beliefs:

"My hero growing up was Joe Slovo, who spoke only Yiddish until he was nine and upon moving to South Africa as a boy from Lithuania (we South Africans are almost all Litvaks, except my mom's side, who are Sephardi) became the head of the military wing of the African National Congress. There are Slovos in every place Jews have gone, people who have devoted themselves as Jews (though I'll admit Slovo was not as good a Jew as say, Abraham Joshua Heschel) to the fate of non-Jews. There's a tension, but for me the value is in the tension, in loving Zionism and Judaism and also feeling that one's love of who one is impels one towards moral universalism. I see that spirit powerfully in the Israeli left. It's the use of Jewish suffering as a moral imperative not only to act on behalf of imperiled Jews, but of imperiled non-Jews that really touches me. "

Most of us here in Israel don’t have the confidence in our neighbors to allow ourselves the luxury of moral universalism. We didn’t approve of the restraint showed by our national leaders during the 2006 war with Hizbullah, and we did approve of the so-called “disproportionate response” to Hamas terror two years later. We feel sorry for the innocent civilians killed in Gaza and are dismayed that they were used as human shields, but there is no remorse that our casualty figures didn’t match those of Hamas fighters.

That Joe Slovo is Peter Beinart’s hero explains a whole lot. I first heard Slovo’s name when I travelled through South Africa in two eye-opening trips during the apartheid era and visited Johannesburg, Soweto, Capetown, and Grahamstown. [Today, I still listen to the music of the Jewish-Zulu singer Johnny Clegg.] As I visited various schools, I met dozens of Jewish students who were drawn to the right-wing politics of Meir Kahana or to the left-wing liberation politics of the banned African National Congress, led by Mandela and his former classmate, Joe Slovo. I tried to pull the students away from the extremes of both their camps.

Many of the leftist students seemed ridden with guilt. Most seemed to live like the Nationalists (“Nats”) -- with blacks coming from the townships to work in their homes – while they screamed their rage against the Nationalist government.

Peter Beinart’s parents moved from South Africa to Cambridge before he was born, but it is obvious that the South African experience still weighs on the younger Beinart. He refers to himself in the Goldberg dialogue as “we South Africans.” He told C-Span in 2005, “the anti-Apartheid movement was a very powerful force in both [of his parents’] lives, and that was really in many ways one of the great movements of the 20th century.…”

Beinart’s hero, Joe Slovo, was a committed Marxist dedicated to overthrowing the apartheid regime. But he also bore a deep hatred for Israel. This is what Slovo wrote, as published in his unfinished autobiography published after his death in 1995:

"Within a few years the wars of consolidation and expansion began. Ironically enough, the horrors of the Holocaust became the rationalization for the preparation by Zionists of acts of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine. Those of us who, in the years that were to follow, raised our voices publicly against the violent apartheid of the Israeli state were vilified by the Zionist press. It is ironic, too, that the Jew-haters in South Africa – those who worked and prayed for a Hitler victory – have been linked in close embrace with the rulers of Israel in a new axis based on racism."

Beinart, like the ultra-Orthodox fringe group Neturei Karta, views today’s Israel as godless and increasingly illegitimate in the scheme of his moral universalism. For him, Israel is embroiled in a battle between the light and darkness – a “domestic struggle between democrats and authoritarians.” He envisions a Yerushalayim shel Ma’aleh – a heavenly, utopian Jerusalem led by Israel’s left.

That’s not my view, nor the view of the majority of Israelis as we express our opinions in our democratic elections.

Have we come to a point that the standard penitence for South African Jewish ex-pats and ex-Nats, whether Beinart or the hanging judge Richard Goldstone, is to say 20 Hail Marys and to kick Israel?

PS: In preparing this article I discovered that Joe Slovo is admired by another well known Jewish figure who was often critical of Israel: David Miliband, the former British Foreign Secretary.

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