J Street. (Photo credit: wikicommons/Joe Mabel)
There comes a point when a public figure’s unraveling becomes so predictable, so theatrical, so nakedly self-regarding that it stops being tragic and becomes tedious. Peter Beinart — a once-respected liberal commentator who reinvented himself as the anti-Zionist movement’s favorite Jewish validator — has long hovered near that line. His latest apology — his self-flagellating denunciation for addressing Israeli students without first seeking permission from the ideological wardens of anti-Zionist activism — crosses it decisively.
The offense was benign: a lecture at Tel Aviv University, where he was invited to discuss politics with students eager to engage with a critic directly. But to the activists he now serves, speaking to Israelis at all — on their campus, in their country — is a breach of purity. And so, he rushed to abase himself.
This collapse was not sudden. It is the predictable endpoint of a years-long slide. Ever since his 2020 “Goodbye to Zionism” manifesto, his embrace of a one-state framework favored by BDS leaders, his depiction of Israel as an “apartheid” project, and his support for academic boycotts of Israeli institutions, Beinart has moved steadily from critique of Israel to rejection of Jewish sovereignty itself. In the worldview he has helped construct, addressing Israeli students is not a conversation — it is a violation.
His public persona depends on a single maneuver: chastising other Jews to earn status among progressives who distrust Jewish power on principle. The more strident his attacks on Israel, the more eagerly certain circles embrace him as their preferred “good Jew.” He knows this. He cultivates it. And he has internalized its demands so completely that he now apologizes not for wrongdoing but for breaking rules written by people who reject the legitimacy of Jewish collective existence altogether.
His Tel Aviv confession is the purest expression of this pathology. It reads like a parody of contrition — an overwrought admission of “harm” for the non-crime of speaking to Israelis. He calls the lecture a “mistake,” as if addressing students were morally suspect. He pleads for forgiveness from activists who insist Jewish sovereignty itself is oppression. This is not conscience. It is fear dressed up as introspection.
And that fear exposes the game he has been playing for years: a bid to remain valuable to a movement that views him not as a thinker, but as a prop. No one directed him to grovel; he did so instinctively, having absorbed the ideological pressure to remain a compliant, usable symbol. He functions as the Jewish showpiece anti-Zionists deploy to prove their ideology isn’t antisemitic. The moment he deviates, he anticipates the reprimand — and disciplines himself before others can do it for him.
This is the real Beinart: not a brave dissenter but an insecure performer whose moral posture shifts with the preferences of the audience he courts. He targets fellow Jews because doing so wins applause from those who distrust Jewish agency. He apologizes to activists who oppose Jewish national existence not because he agrees, but because he cannot stand the thought of losing their praise.
Beinart once aimed to influence the debate. Now he merely auditions for it. A man who apologizes for speaking to Israelis is a man with nothing meaningful left to say.
His bluff has been exposed. He has chosen smallness. And we should allow him to remain exactly where he has placed himself.
I agree that Beinart’s back and forth with him himself about whether or not to speak at TAU – including very lengthy, self-referential essays about deciding to speak and then apologizing for doing so – was very over-the-top and unnecessarily theatrical. But as a longtime Bienart reader and a weekly subscriber to his Substack/blog, I do think he was genuinely wrestling with the decision, whether you think it is worth wrestling with or not. And the idea that his motivation is “to earn status among progressives who distrust Jewish power on principle” is very obviously not true. Bienert is very open about the fact that his primary audience is fellow Jews – indeed, his strong desire to speak directly to Israeli Jews at TAU was why he initially broke the academic boycott to do so. And his most recent book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” is explicitly intended to open a conversation with fellow Jews about how we can come together after the wholesale destruction of Gaza. It’s of course fine to think Bienart is meshugana for wrestling with BDS and the academic boycott and for his broader views about a one-state solution and considering Palestinian sovereignty in addition to Jewish sovereignty, but don’t pretend that he’s disingenuous or motivated by Lefty status. I think he should respected for making a consistent effort to build relationships with Palestinians – a perspective that relative few in mainstream Jewish spaces regularly consider. And in the greatest of Jewish traditions, he is committed to genuinely wrestling with hard questions – guests on his Bienart Notebook run from far-right to far-left and everyone is given fair hearing.