Beinart takes a wrecking ball to Israel

Peter Beinart’s headline session at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas last Sunday was titled Facing Moral Wreckage. True to his word, by the end of it, Israel’s political system and culture lay in ruins.

The American journalist, in conversation with ABC broadcaster Geraldine Doogue before a partisan audience of nearly 800 people at Sydney’s Carriageworks, deliberated over a wide range of subjects including the inherent dangers of Israel’s “supremacist” system of government, the fallacy that Israel is the ultimate safe haven for Jews and why it is legitimate to compare Israel’s crimes to those of the Nazis.

While Beinart’s demolition was comprehensive, and his analysis of inequality persuasive, he also sidestepped several inconvenient questions about the Middle East, notably with regard to assigning any responsibility on the Palestinian side and what sort of future its leaders see for living with Jewish Israelis.

The central argument of Beinart’s critique of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians is that Jewish Israelis have created a legal supremacy that has made the country’s political system and society immoral, and its future unsustainable.

One of the ironic byproducts of this inequality, he told the Festival audience, is that “Jews are much safer in Australia, despite the terrible incident at Bondi Beach, in the United States, and in Canada than they are in the Jewish state. The reason is that the state of Israel … inflicts tremendous violence on Palestinians. When you classify people as legal inferiors, you inflict tremendous violence on them, even if it's sometimes invisible to you. And that violence actually makes everybody less safe.”

Asked by Doogue about the way forward for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis to share the land, he said: “Israel is based on Jewish supremacy over Palestinians. Most clearly, you can see it in the West Bank, where you have two completely different legal systems. But even in Israel proper, there are forms of legalised Jewish supremacy.