Why I Debate People With Whom I Disagree
JVL Introduction
Peter Beinart recently interviewed Omar Barghouti, ” the most prominent BDS leader in the world”. Remarkably, he was not much criticised by the right for so doing.
However, he has come under great criticism from the left for a discussion he has agreed to participate in with the New Zionist Congress, a group of young Jews who feel their generation is experiencing antisemitism for supporting Israel and who want to unapologetically defend the Jewish state.
Here he responds to the criticism, explaining why he feels it worth debating with people he profoundly disagrees with (and who profoundly disagree with him!).
Thanks to Peter Beinart for permission to repost.
This article was originally published by The Beinart Notebook on Mon 12 Jul 2021. Read the original here.
Why I Debate People With Whom I Disagree
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I support Peter Beinart.
There is no point in debating with people who you agree with. The point of debate surely is to change minds.
But if you are going to debate with Zionists then you have to be clear. “Complexity” is a tactic used by Zionists to muddy the waters.
For me the moral issue is very clear: Israel wouldn’t exist as a predominantly Jewish State but for the Ethnic Cleansing of 1948. Ethnic Cleansing is violent racism and can never be morally justified.
Readers of this post might like to read my book entitled:’Zionism and history: reading the wrong lesson from the persecution of the Jews’.
In the book I argue that the Zionist movement, started by Theodor Herzl in 1896, has not achieved its aim, namely to end the persecution of the Jews.
The book is published by the Bristol Radical History Group and can be obtained through its website or on Amazon.
Michael Levine
Yes, most definitely have the debate but Peter Beinart would do well to heed the view of Avigail Abarbanel that Zionism is a mental illness. It means they won’t be listening to a word he says and will constantly attempt to drag him off into the long grass to get even the minutest gotcha confirmation of their position. They believe that God is on their side which gives them rights which he does not have and those imaginary rights confer upon them infallibility when it comes to colonising Palestine.
With people like Peter Beinart writing and speaking, we might, one day, see light at the end of the tunnel.
However, I must say I find the matter somewhat bizarre. I speak as a Christian, who supports Jewish Voice for Labour as best I can, and as one who is ruled by Christ’s teaching, above the mass of subsequent interpreters, with the fundamental requirement to love my neighbour as my self. My knowledge of the Jewish religion is limited, and based on my reading of the Old Testament and very much influenced by the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses.
On that basis, the whole Zionist concept of the occupation of Palestine, to the absolute exclusion of its previous inhabitants, is, simply, rubbish and, as far as I can tell, incompatible with the Jewish religion.
However, it does raise the question of why the Jewish people in history were persecuted. It seems to me that not all were, but commercial success and exclusivity might have been a cause of much of it.
All human beings like to be in some sort of group to give them some sort of identity and, quite frankly, what they get up to is not so different to what goes on in the animal world. Survival of the fittest there is what happens, subject to a degree of cooperation.
At the present time, we are witnessing the acceleration of a crisis that will encompass the whole world:- the climate crisis. This crisis has, in my view, largely arisen from the current religion of free market fundamentalism, almost universally adopted. It will only be beaten, again in my view, by a ditching of the market religion and the adopting of a high degree of cooperation amongst all sorts of human beings. In this context, the Israel/Palestine thing is an unfortunate and evil side issue, which the God or Gods above can only look on with pity, as they prepare a new flood to wipe it all out, and find a new Noah to start the world afresh.
true there is no point debating with people you agree with but there is equally no point in debating with a brick wall – which is what debating with most Zionists is.
On the day that Khalid Jarrar lost her daughter whilst still being interned without trial and 3 days after Esther Bejarano died (who you ask) is this the most interesting thing to publish?
https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2021/07/this-is-how-they-rewrite-history-daily.html
This is really an exercise in self promotion. Beinart however does not debate with the anti-Zionist left.
This has all the shades of Jeremy Corbyn talking to Sin Féin and other political groups, in the 80’s/90’s. Which resulted in the assumption :
‘Corbyn supports the PIRA!’
His riposte has always been :
“I never met the IRA. I obviously did meet people from Sinn Féin, as indeed I met people from other organisations, and I always made the point that there had to be a dialogue and a peace process.”
That’s a difficult position to get others to understand, but, nevertheless, a legitimate position.
It had many similarities, to the position Peter Beinart finds himself in, now.
I also agree with Peter Beinart on this point. We can’t make progress by talking to each other, only by talking to those who disagree with us. The problem I’ve had in the past is getting those who disagree to even engage in a discussion – they understand on some level that their position is unjustifiable, so avoid debate if at all possible.
It’s also important to show Zionists (and everyone else) that it really is a myth that all Jews support Israel and to explain why it’s actually in the long-term interests of Israeli Jews to support a just solution – which in my view, would be a single and preferably secular state between the river and the sea.
Excellent article. You might not change someone’s mind, but it might alter their perspective, even if only by the merest degree.
I don’t think most people on the left would have any problem with debating people just because they are Zionist.
Does the article make the left sound more intolerant than other people ?
Zionists or fascists who use violence to attack other people’s meetings (and there may be some), then no, in those situations you can consider ‘no platforming’.
But going into the sanctums of Zionists and putting forward strong arguments in open debate can make people who tend to hear the same views all the time, question, or soften, their convictions… sometimes even some of their leadership.
Meanwhile here in the UK the lsraeli lobby run a mile away from any debate with supporters of Palestinian justice.
I have just come away from an exchange ( it couldn’t be called a debate, any more than you could call the cry ‘fake news!’ an argument) with two Israelis on Twitter. This ended with one of them accusing me of antisemitism and blood libel, while the second complained that I refused to examine the malign actions of the Palestinians, which apparently justified everything that was done to them. One point where #1 caught me out was when I said that prior to 1948 Jews and Palestinians had been able to live together more or less in peace. This brought down on my head a torrent of outrage centering around the gruesome details if the 1929 killing of Jews in Hebron and the various machinations of the Grand Mufti. Neither of the two was prepared to accept that the treatment of the Palestinians was in any way disproportionate or that Ben Gurion’s Plan Dalet involved the removal of the Palestinians to make way for Zionist settlers and the new state of Israel. Along the way I was told that the Zionists had come up with very reasonable proposals which the Palestinians unreasonably refused to countenance, and that Israel had very generously made Palestine the gift of Gaza.
So was the exchange a waste of time? Not altogether, since I learned that the IHRA definition can be cited against the argument that the world body of Jews is conterminous with Israel – a claim that according to the IHRA could be seen as antisemitic.
Those who are used to these exchanges will have come across all these talking points any number of times – I suspect they are taught to Israelis in school. For me that was a depressing realization, since it means that the road to compromise is pretty firmly closed. If Israelis refuse to see anything wrong in what they are doing, how can they ever be persuaded to change their ways? Beats me.