That's what I'm saying. Stop supporting a utopian (at best) "solution" that is extremely unpopular and start supporting a real solution that both sides want and that will alleviate Palestinian 'suffering'. If in fact you care about stopping Palestinian 'suffering.'
In this same poll, more Israelis favor apartheid than the 2SS. What's interesting to me is that 25 percent of Israelis and Palestinians support an equal rights state... the same percentage of young American Jews who support it. We've nowhere to go but up... and we will.
It’s not 1995 anymore. The 2SS, for all its original promise and other advantages on paper, devolved into farce and is dead for all intents and purposes.
It seems to me, that by process of elimination, the alternative choices are now between a liberal binational state or an undemocratic apartheid state.
FWIW, if you want to argue that the 2SS must be reinvigorated and pursued in earnest, you will have my support. However the burden is on you to show how that can be done and why that path today is any less unrealistic or utopian than Mr. Beinarts position, which is compellingly based on human rights and equality under the law.
I suspect you are more interested, as a purely tactical matter, in wearing the corpse of the 2SS —Hannibal Lector-style—for cover to moralistically scold the writer for his position and project your own cynical motivations and antipathy towards the Palestinians onto him while dodging any obligation to propose any actually viable alternative.
Hey Paul, congrats on Palestine's big win today. We can look forward to a lot more of the same if your and Peter's visions of a binational state ever comes to fruition.
The burden is on you to prove your declaration that the 2SS is dead. The two nations are more separated than they have ever been, the PA and Hamas have more autonomy than they've ever have, and all that's left is to work out the final details. The status quo is the 2SS, more or less.
If you're interested in human rights and equality, you shouldn't be demanding the Jews give up their state and become unequal to dozens of other nations and lose their right of self-determination. That's actually the opposite of human rights and equality.
Spot on, again and again. These politics of distraction go hand in hand with the occupation authorities' politics of overwhelming our society here in Palestine like never before: killings, arrests, house demolitions, uprooting trees, settler rampages, storming holy sights, and on and on and on. Israel knows very well that our capacity to withstand is limited, before it turns to violent resistance. Bibi and Co are begging for violence. I plea to Gaza to be as prepared as possible; they will pay the price of Israeli societal collapse.
Sam, don't fall for it. Beinart doesn't give a rats ass about you or about the suffering of the Palestinian people. He hasn't written about it for literally months, and it's not like he wasn't aware of the situation before today. The only reason why he's bringing it up now is because he's uncomfortable talking about Ken Roth's whining, entitled attitude toward a Harvard fellowship and the obvious biases of HRW.
Peace is readily achievable between Israel and Palestine when Palestinians 1) accept Israel’s right to exist; 2) agree to a state of their own next to Israel; and 3) agree to a “right of return” to a new state of Palestine and not to Israel.
For over 70 years there have been numerous formal and informal efforts to achieve a two state peace, but all have ended with Palestinian rejection. But times are changing as Arab countries refuse to be held hostage by Palestinian intransigence and are normalizing relations with Israel.
When the corrupt, criminal Palestinian leaders stop teaching children that one day they will ‘drive the Jews into the sea’, and instead choose to live side by side in peace, then both peoples can thrive.
a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.
The descendants of descendants of descendants of refugees are not refugees, despite the Palestinians trying to change the definition. Israel has in past negotiations offered the opportunity for 1948 refugees to return to their ancestral homes. That’s very different than for millions of descendants -- yet this has been the excuse given time and time again for Palestinian rejectionism.
Having read your replies, articles, and letters -- you are a critic, an accuser, and an apologist -- but can you provide a solution? Pretend you are representing the Palestinians at the negotiating table: let's hear what your proposal would be for a two-state peace agreement.
Richard, nothing you have said here is true. Here is the real truth by Robert Herbst.
"Perhaps most demoralizing of all was the continuing capture and control of the narrative – the “Occupation of the American Mind” — by Israeli hasbara that has mischaracterized the facts on the ground over there for my entire lifetime and resulted in the marginalization and silencing of Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices by the mainstream media, the Israel lobby, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the cacophony of “pro-Israel” supporters who together have made Palestinians out to be terrorists and their Israeli oppressors victims; when in fact, the Israeli state and settler violence arrayed against the Palestinians has always dwarfed that of the resistance. It has been a remarkable feat of propaganda and narrative control to carry out these crimes against humanity and slowly but inexorably Judaicizing the Land, pretending to be yearning for a two-state solution while deliberately taking steps to kill any prospect of it. The hasbara has seemed as impenetrable as the Apartheid system it supports.
As for Arab countries normalising relations with Israel. Those Arab countries were bullied into submission by Trump & Kushner.
Ha! That’s a joke. As they say about the Palestinian leaders, there has never been an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Palestinians could have had their own country time and time again, but have chosen the path and propaganda campaign to their people that one day they will kick the Jews out and control the land from the river to the sea. And for the corrupt leaders, why not? It’s a good gig funneling humanitarian aid to themselves.
So yes, after being repeatedly, rejected and terrorized, Israelis have become more nationalistic and less compromising. After all, how many times can one hit their head against the wall before saying “no more“?
The onus is on the Palestinians and I remain hopeful that a courageous leader will emerge and recognize that living in peace next to Israel in their own demilitarized country will be a better future. If and when that happens, regardless of which Israeli government is in place, peace will happen. And then both people can live thrive.
" All previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.
The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.
Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.
.Israel’s disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet – with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington’s lead – has collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting Israel’s claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace partner."
Fortunately, the actual truth is well understood among leaders of the regional Arab countries. Historically, it has been a convenient salve to their own people to highlight the plight of the Palestinians. -- yet little actual humanitarian aid was sent by these oil-rich nations to the Palestinians because they don't support their narrative nor rejectionist ideology. And today, they are looking to the future and normalizing with Israel with the Saudis holding out until the King passes, but already working together behid the scenes in business, defense and cultural ties.
The Palestinians are the living definition of "cutting off your nose to spite your face". They continue to keep themselves in a dire predicament rather than making peace -- even though its a losing proposition and only holding themselves back while the people of the region move forward. So, call it what you want, but acknowledging "defeat" or at least that they will not "return" to Israel and must live instead in their own country next to Israel, will lead to tremendous international support and a chance to move into the civilized world of nations. But, it's up to the Palestinians to make the next bold step. Not Israel.
Peter, you need to practice what you preach. I've been reading your Substack for about a year now and the vast majority of articles you write on the I/P conflict are NOT about the daily realities of Palestinians. In fact, I can't even recall one. They're about Zionism, Trump and Republicans, concern trolling about anti-Semitism, and other topics. If you actually believe that the conversation should be about the daily realities for Palestinians, you should write some articles about it.
You keep making the same arguments over and over again about Zionism, anti-Semitism and Israel's right to exist, so you're contributing to the very distractions you complain about in your article. But you're not the only one. Noam Chomsky commented that when BDS launched a divestment campaign at Harvard, the conversation swiftly devolved to anti-Semitism at Harvard and the rights of Jews to a state. The Palestinians were sidelined in favor for discussions about Zionism and anti-Zionism. Similarly, Norman Finkelstein agrees with Chomsky that BDS, which is the current north star of pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel activism, is a huge gift to Israeli hard liners because every conversation around BDS and Palestine quickly becomes 'here they are trying to destroy us' because that's what BDS wants to do, destroy Israel. Again, wherever pro-Palestinian activism goes, the conversation is always about Zionism and the rights of Jews to a state, and if Palestinians are ever mentioned it's only as a prop about why Zionism is bad. Your Substack is no exception to this rule.
So if you actually sincerely believe in doing the work and helping the Palestinians on the ground (which I don't believe you do), then maybe you should start acting like it and writing about the daily realities over there. Maybe even leave your comfortable office and do some actual work on the ground. I look forward to your endorsement of the two state solution, the internationally agreed upon consensus to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the method by which Palestinian 'suffering' will be alleviated the quickest and most effectively.
Beinart, HRW is so incredibly biased against Israel that its own founder and chairman for twenty years took to the pages of the New York Times to tell the world how biased HRW has become.
Amazing how people like you can reconcile how if 70% of convicts if the American prison system were Black, that would be clear evidence of institutional racism, but HRW devoting 70% of its coverage to the world's only Jewish state doesn't mean anything.
But I do agree with you that the Ken Roth discussion is not important and not worth discussing. A rich white man didn't get a job he felt he was entitled to, and used his power and platform to whine about it publicly for weeks, and then he finally did get the job. Another example of white male privilege working. One wonders if Roth cares at all about the qualified BIPOC candidates that were left out of the position in favor of him.
Instead, Beinart, I'd like your thoughts about the NUS report that just came out, which describes in detail the bullying and harassment suffered by Jewish students who are just going about their education at British universities at the hands of your fellow pro-Palestinians. Unlike Ken Roth, they're not rich and do not have thousands of followers on Twitter to hear about their suffering, until this report came out they were suffering in relative silence. That's a daily reality I'd like you to discuss, if you have any thoughts about it, considering you're so interested in fighting anti-Semitism and have written so extensively about it.
Why Harvard should have stuck to its guns rejecting Ken Roth:
Robert Bernstein, the founder and chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to 1998, said HRW had drifted from its mission of monitoring closed societies and authoritarian regimes and questioned why HRW disproportionately targeted Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, rather than regimes that repress, imprison, and kill their own citizens.
“Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields,” he wrote.
When Arab-Israeli‘s have been polled about whether they would become Palestinian citizens or stay as Israeli citizens should a Palestinian state emerge, 95%+ say they would prefer staying Israeli. Go figure… 
Are you arguing that now with tens of thousands of Israelis living in the West Bank, they should be allowed to stay as Palestinian citizens in the event of peace between Israel and Palestine?
So, in reading your various articles and letters, you are consistently critical, and negative about what you think of the world’s treatment of the Palestinians. So here’s an exercise: pretend you are the man in charge of making peace between Israel and Palestine. Let’s hear how it would look in your mind?
Peter, I do agree that the plight of Palestinians right now is an urgent matter. But as a non-Jew I also find the issue of being cancelled in my own country (Canada), by an enormously successful Israel lobby, to be an urgent matter. I resent the gaslighting by this lobby. It is dishonest. The lobby is too effective and the effects of this lobby on non-Jews is Orwellian.
Israel is just another rogue and rotten agent by now. Like Saudi and Russia, they know that their only chance of survival is to defang and sabotage Western democracies before those take them to justice. MBS knows that. Putin knows that. Jonathan Greenblatt knows that.
Abbas has a point about the West Bank Settlements. Allowing settlers to build there was a suicidal move by the Israelis -- it made a two state solution impossible. So, having done it they now have to live with the consequence -- one state.
I disagree that settlement building/expansion is a problem for the Israelis of 2023. It is a problem for non-Jews and critical Jews in western countries (and some in Israel) where our leaders are now gaslighting us, censoring us, and making us pretend antisemitism is a problem when in reality the problem is that we have to change our concept of reality to fit the pro-Israel position. Israel as a supremacist, zionist state will be fine. It can just alter everyone else’s reality. And our western leaders, under the spell of the lobby, are happy to do this.
Thank you for your incisive teasing out of the issues, Peter. You bring clarity to the areas where we stumble. You take the distractions away and clear the waters of mud. It was greatly appreciated.
Correction Peter. One of the main problems is the support Israel gets from the American government and the influence the American Jewish community has on that government and on the media. And Canada is not that different. Having lived in France for many years I have always known about the abuses in Israel-Palestine. The media covered it, at least some media. It is profoundly shocking that coverage is given to the demonstrations in Israel just now while nothing is said about what is happening in the settlements.
I was happy to see you are bringing Barak Ravid this coming Thursday. I never miss an article by him, and his book on the Abraham Accords (don’t know if it is available in English) was outstanding. I really am looking forward to hear him again in English to an American audience. Once in a while, rarely though, I find him missing the point, but to err is human…Question: why can’t we talk both about the grave situation in the West Bank AND the impact of Jewish donors? The latter had a good outcome following the NSO fiasco discovered by The Citizens Lab at the University of Toronto, not getting into details here. Most importantly, right now there is an explosion of anger in Israel against the American Jewish Forum Kohelet, working for years surreptitiously in Israel and now openly to destroy the judiciary, media, social supports and government structures and supplant them with a radical racist and religious state. It is going to be fascinating to see what the great awareness awakening and the popular pushback to these will bring about. I am speaking on Feb. 2 on the new government so following extensively in Hebrew.
I don’t support two states. I support legal equality in one binational state. My Yavne essay in Jewish Currents makes that case
That's what I'm saying. Stop supporting a utopian (at best) "solution" that is extremely unpopular and start supporting a real solution that both sides want and that will alleviate Palestinian 'suffering'. If in fact you care about stopping Palestinian 'suffering.'
In this same poll, more Israelis favor apartheid than the 2SS. What's interesting to me is that 25 percent of Israelis and Palestinians support an equal rights state... the same percentage of young American Jews who support it. We've nowhere to go but up... and we will.
"start supporting a real solution that both sides want"
Who's being "utopian" here? Can you name one such solution?
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-01-25/ty-article/.premium/israeli-palestinian-poll-shows-support-for-two-state-solution-at-all-time-low/00000185-e461-d109-a7af-e571a7330000
Thanks for the link.
"<25% of either side support a 1 state democratic solution"
Looks like Peter's 'solution' is extremely unpopular on both sides.
It’s not 1995 anymore. The 2SS, for all its original promise and other advantages on paper, devolved into farce and is dead for all intents and purposes.
It seems to me, that by process of elimination, the alternative choices are now between a liberal binational state or an undemocratic apartheid state.
FWIW, if you want to argue that the 2SS must be reinvigorated and pursued in earnest, you will have my support. However the burden is on you to show how that can be done and why that path today is any less unrealistic or utopian than Mr. Beinarts position, which is compellingly based on human rights and equality under the law.
I suspect you are more interested, as a purely tactical matter, in wearing the corpse of the 2SS —Hannibal Lector-style—for cover to moralistically scold the writer for his position and project your own cynical motivations and antipathy towards the Palestinians onto him while dodging any obligation to propose any actually viable alternative.
Hey Paul, congrats on Palestine's big win today. We can look forward to a lot more of the same if your and Peter's visions of a binational state ever comes to fruition.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/israeli-rescue-service-5-killed-jerusalem-synagogue-shooting-96723448
I saw that. More bloodshed by innocents, it’s truly horrible.
The burden is on you to prove your declaration that the 2SS is dead. The two nations are more separated than they have ever been, the PA and Hamas have more autonomy than they've ever have, and all that's left is to work out the final details. The status quo is the 2SS, more or less.
If you're interested in human rights and equality, you shouldn't be demanding the Jews give up their state and become unequal to dozens of other nations and lose their right of self-determination. That's actually the opposite of human rights and equality.
thanks Doris
Thanks Richard. I tried to do something that here https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine and here https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
Spot on, again and again. These politics of distraction go hand in hand with the occupation authorities' politics of overwhelming our society here in Palestine like never before: killings, arrests, house demolitions, uprooting trees, settler rampages, storming holy sights, and on and on and on. Israel knows very well that our capacity to withstand is limited, before it turns to violent resistance. Bibi and Co are begging for violence. I plea to Gaza to be as prepared as possible; they will pay the price of Israeli societal collapse.
Sam, don't fall for it. Beinart doesn't give a rats ass about you or about the suffering of the Palestinian people. He hasn't written about it for literally months, and it's not like he wasn't aware of the situation before today. The only reason why he's bringing it up now is because he's uncomfortable talking about Ken Roth's whining, entitled attitude toward a Harvard fellowship and the obvious biases of HRW.
Peace is readily achievable between Israel and Palestine when Palestinians 1) accept Israel’s right to exist; 2) agree to a state of their own next to Israel; and 3) agree to a “right of return” to a new state of Palestine and not to Israel.
For over 70 years there have been numerous formal and informal efforts to achieve a two state peace, but all have ended with Palestinian rejection. But times are changing as Arab countries refuse to be held hostage by Palestinian intransigence and are normalizing relations with Israel.
When the corrupt, criminal Palestinian leaders stop teaching children that one day they will ‘drive the Jews into the sea’, and instead choose to live side by side in peace, then both peoples can thrive.
#1 Did that in 1993, still waiting for Israel to recognize the NEW (truncated) Palestine:
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-205528/
#2 Did that too and the majority of the world recognized NEW (truncated) Palestine: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N12/479/74/PDF/N1247974.pdf?OpenElement
#3 It is not you or me who will decide the fate of refugees, please educate yourself with this landmark reference:
https://www.972mag.com/palestinian-refugees-international-law-review/
Sam, it’s one thing to send a letter recognizing Israel, it’s something else to reject Israel in practice, over and over again: https://besacenter.org/palestinian-rejectionism/
ref·u·gee
/ˈrefyəˌjē/
noun
a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.
The descendants of descendants of descendants of refugees are not refugees, despite the Palestinians trying to change the definition. Israel has in past negotiations offered the opportunity for 1948 refugees to return to their ancestral homes. That’s very different than for millions of descendants -- yet this has been the excuse given time and time again for Palestinian rejectionism.
As for the so-called Deal of the Century:
http://bit.ly/Open-Letter-To-Jared-Kushner
Spare me the out-dated hasbara talking points...
https://www.pij.org/articles/2138/incompetence-or-accomplice
As for refugees, if this happen to you, what would you do? Drop your intl rights?
Israeli filmmaker: https://youtu.be/w7TVcF2ArKA
Having read your replies, articles, and letters -- you are a critic, an accuser, and an apologist -- but can you provide a solution? Pretend you are representing the Palestinians at the negotiating table: let's hear what your proposal would be for a two-state peace agreement.
First published In NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/opinion/israel-palestinian-confederation.html
https://sbahour.medium.com/opinion-want-israeli-palestinian-peace-try-confederation-f5058b22fac3?sk=2618a407efd33f492fb5a55b80e0b163
Richard, nothing you have said here is true. Here is the real truth by Robert Herbst.
"Perhaps most demoralizing of all was the continuing capture and control of the narrative – the “Occupation of the American Mind” — by Israeli hasbara that has mischaracterized the facts on the ground over there for my entire lifetime and resulted in the marginalization and silencing of Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices by the mainstream media, the Israel lobby, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the cacophony of “pro-Israel” supporters who together have made Palestinians out to be terrorists and their Israeli oppressors victims; when in fact, the Israeli state and settler violence arrayed against the Palestinians has always dwarfed that of the resistance. It has been a remarkable feat of propaganda and narrative control to carry out these crimes against humanity and slowly but inexorably Judaicizing the Land, pretending to be yearning for a two-state solution while deliberately taking steps to kill any prospect of it. The hasbara has seemed as impenetrable as the Apartheid system it supports.
As for Arab countries normalising relations with Israel. Those Arab countries were bullied into submission by Trump & Kushner.
Ha! That’s a joke. As they say about the Palestinian leaders, there has never been an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Palestinians could have had their own country time and time again, but have chosen the path and propaganda campaign to their people that one day they will kick the Jews out and control the land from the river to the sea. And for the corrupt leaders, why not? It’s a good gig funneling humanitarian aid to themselves.
So yes, after being repeatedly, rejected and terrorized, Israelis have become more nationalistic and less compromising. After all, how many times can one hit their head against the wall before saying “no more“?
The onus is on the Palestinians and I remain hopeful that a courageous leader will emerge and recognize that living in peace next to Israel in their own demilitarized country will be a better future. If and when that happens, regardless of which Israeli government is in place, peace will happen. And then both people can live thrive.
" All previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.
The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.
Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.
.Israel’s disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet – with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington’s lead – has collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting Israel’s claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace partner."
Another truth teller, Henry Siegman.
Fortunately, the actual truth is well understood among leaders of the regional Arab countries. Historically, it has been a convenient salve to their own people to highlight the plight of the Palestinians. -- yet little actual humanitarian aid was sent by these oil-rich nations to the Palestinians because they don't support their narrative nor rejectionist ideology. And today, they are looking to the future and normalizing with Israel with the Saudis holding out until the King passes, but already working together behid the scenes in business, defense and cultural ties.
The Palestinians are the living definition of "cutting off your nose to spite your face". They continue to keep themselves in a dire predicament rather than making peace -- even though its a losing proposition and only holding themselves back while the people of the region move forward. So, call it what you want, but acknowledging "defeat" or at least that they will not "return" to Israel and must live instead in their own country next to Israel, will lead to tremendous international support and a chance to move into the civilized world of nations. But, it's up to the Palestinians to make the next bold step. Not Israel.
Peter, you need to practice what you preach. I've been reading your Substack for about a year now and the vast majority of articles you write on the I/P conflict are NOT about the daily realities of Palestinians. In fact, I can't even recall one. They're about Zionism, Trump and Republicans, concern trolling about anti-Semitism, and other topics. If you actually believe that the conversation should be about the daily realities for Palestinians, you should write some articles about it.
You keep making the same arguments over and over again about Zionism, anti-Semitism and Israel's right to exist, so you're contributing to the very distractions you complain about in your article. But you're not the only one. Noam Chomsky commented that when BDS launched a divestment campaign at Harvard, the conversation swiftly devolved to anti-Semitism at Harvard and the rights of Jews to a state. The Palestinians were sidelined in favor for discussions about Zionism and anti-Zionism. Similarly, Norman Finkelstein agrees with Chomsky that BDS, which is the current north star of pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel activism, is a huge gift to Israeli hard liners because every conversation around BDS and Palestine quickly becomes 'here they are trying to destroy us' because that's what BDS wants to do, destroy Israel. Again, wherever pro-Palestinian activism goes, the conversation is always about Zionism and the rights of Jews to a state, and if Palestinians are ever mentioned it's only as a prop about why Zionism is bad. Your Substack is no exception to this rule.
So if you actually sincerely believe in doing the work and helping the Palestinians on the ground (which I don't believe you do), then maybe you should start acting like it and writing about the daily realities over there. Maybe even leave your comfortable office and do some actual work on the ground. I look forward to your endorsement of the two state solution, the internationally agreed upon consensus to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the method by which Palestinian 'suffering' will be alleviated the quickest and most effectively.
Beinart, HRW is so incredibly biased against Israel that its own founder and chairman for twenty years took to the pages of the New York Times to tell the world how biased HRW has become.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opinion/20bernstein.html
Amazing how people like you can reconcile how if 70% of convicts if the American prison system were Black, that would be clear evidence of institutional racism, but HRW devoting 70% of its coverage to the world's only Jewish state doesn't mean anything.
But I do agree with you that the Ken Roth discussion is not important and not worth discussing. A rich white man didn't get a job he felt he was entitled to, and used his power and platform to whine about it publicly for weeks, and then he finally did get the job. Another example of white male privilege working. One wonders if Roth cares at all about the qualified BIPOC candidates that were left out of the position in favor of him.
Instead, Beinart, I'd like your thoughts about the NUS report that just came out, which describes in detail the bullying and harassment suffered by Jewish students who are just going about their education at British universities at the hands of your fellow pro-Palestinians. Unlike Ken Roth, they're not rich and do not have thousands of followers on Twitter to hear about their suffering, until this report came out they were suffering in relative silence. That's a daily reality I'd like you to discuss, if you have any thoughts about it, considering you're so interested in fighting anti-Semitism and have written so extensively about it.
Why Harvard should have stuck to its guns rejecting Ken Roth:
Robert Bernstein, the founder and chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to 1998, said HRW had drifted from its mission of monitoring closed societies and authoritarian regimes and questioned why HRW disproportionately targeted Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, rather than regimes that repress, imprison, and kill their own citizens.
“Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields,” he wrote.
Israel is not a democracy. Religion is the prerequisite for citizenship -- hence, it's a theocracy.
??? 20% of Israel’s citizens are Muslim with rights far better than Muslims in every Muslim-only country.
Far better than Muslims in other countries? -- But not as good as Jewish Israelis.....
When Arab-Israeli‘s have been polled about whether they would become Palestinian citizens or stay as Israeli citizens should a Palestinian state emerge, 95%+ say they would prefer staying Israeli. Go figure… 
And this proves that people would prefer to stay in the place they were born, raised and live --- even if they have to hope for equality.
Are you arguing that now with tens of thousands of Israelis living in the West Bank, they should be allowed to stay as Palestinian citizens in the event of peace between Israel and Palestine?
So, in reading your various articles and letters, you are consistently critical, and negative about what you think of the world’s treatment of the Palestinians. So here’s an exercise: pretend you are the man in charge of making peace between Israel and Palestine. Let’s hear how it would look in your mind?
Thanks for your incisive commentary
Peter, I do agree that the plight of Palestinians right now is an urgent matter. But as a non-Jew I also find the issue of being cancelled in my own country (Canada), by an enormously successful Israel lobby, to be an urgent matter. I resent the gaslighting by this lobby. It is dishonest. The lobby is too effective and the effects of this lobby on non-Jews is Orwellian.
Israel is just another rogue and rotten agent by now. Like Saudi and Russia, they know that their only chance of survival is to defang and sabotage Western democracies before those take them to justice. MBS knows that. Putin knows that. Jonathan Greenblatt knows that.
Abbas has a point about the West Bank Settlements. Allowing settlers to build there was a suicidal move by the Israelis -- it made a two state solution impossible. So, having done it they now have to live with the consequence -- one state.
I disagree that settlement building/expansion is a problem for the Israelis of 2023. It is a problem for non-Jews and critical Jews in western countries (and some in Israel) where our leaders are now gaslighting us, censoring us, and making us pretend antisemitism is a problem when in reality the problem is that we have to change our concept of reality to fit the pro-Israel position. Israel as a supremacist, zionist state will be fine. It can just alter everyone else’s reality. And our western leaders, under the spell of the lobby, are happy to do this.
Thank you for your incisive teasing out of the issues, Peter. You bring clarity to the areas where we stumble. You take the distractions away and clear the waters of mud. It was greatly appreciated.
Correction Peter. One of the main problems is the support Israel gets from the American government and the influence the American Jewish community has on that government and on the media. And Canada is not that different. Having lived in France for many years I have always known about the abuses in Israel-Palestine. The media covered it, at least some media. It is profoundly shocking that coverage is given to the demonstrations in Israel just now while nothing is said about what is happening in the settlements.
I was happy to see you are bringing Barak Ravid this coming Thursday. I never miss an article by him, and his book on the Abraham Accords (don’t know if it is available in English) was outstanding. I really am looking forward to hear him again in English to an American audience. Once in a while, rarely though, I find him missing the point, but to err is human…Question: why can’t we talk both about the grave situation in the West Bank AND the impact of Jewish donors? The latter had a good outcome following the NSO fiasco discovered by The Citizens Lab at the University of Toronto, not getting into details here. Most importantly, right now there is an explosion of anger in Israel against the American Jewish Forum Kohelet, working for years surreptitiously in Israel and now openly to destroy the judiciary, media, social supports and government structures and supplant them with a radical racist and religious state. It is going to be fascinating to see what the great awareness awakening and the popular pushback to these will bring about. I am speaking on Feb. 2 on the new government so following extensively in Hebrew.