Beinart’s boycott and boycotting Beinart

Buckle up.

With his New York Times opinion piece calling for a boycott of West Bank settlements, Peter Beinart is likely to turn a once-simmering debate to a full boil — and put left-wing Jewish groups in a Catch-22 if they are serious about being the defenders of a big-tent vision of the Jewish community.

Here’s Beinart:

We should lobby to exclude settler-produced goods from America’s free-trade deal with Israel. We should push to end Internal Revenue Service policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to settler charities. Every time an American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge it to include the caveat: only within the green line.

But a settlement boycott is not enough. It must be paired with an equally vigorous embrace of democratic Israel. We should spend money we’re not spending on settler goods on those produced within the green line. We should oppose efforts to divest from all Israeli companies with the same intensity with which we support efforts to divest from companies in the settlements: call it Zionist B.D.S.

Yes, there will be those who agree and those who disagree vehemently with the substantive proposal. But ultimately, the wider and more heated debate will be over whether the communal tent has a place for those who support boycotts of the settlements, but are also equally opposed to the BDS (boycotts/divestment/sanctions) campaign against Israel proper.

Beinart is already being billed as a main attraction at the upcoming J Street conference and is slated to speak with New Yorker editor David Remnick next month at Manhattan’s 92 Street Y. And with a new Jew-y website up and running on The Daily Beast called Zion Square and a new Israel-related book about to be released, "The Crisis of Zionism," he’ll be on the circuit for months to come — so it won’t be long before some of Beinart’s critics start calling on Jewish institutions to deny him a platform. And then some will start calling for boycotts of institutions that refuse to boycott Beinart.

Next, we’ll hear from folks — many of them on the left — who say they don’t agree with Beinart’s call for a settlement boycott, but that the Jewish community should be respectful of free speech and embrace a big-tent philosophy.

But then they’ll be faced with a tricky question: If it’s kosher for Peter Beinart to call publicly for across-the-board boycotts against Jews in West Bank settlements, what is so unkosher about calling for a total boycott of Peter Beinart? Beinart says a settlement boycott is necessary to “oppose the forces that threaten [Israel] from within,” but activists on the right say the same sort of thing in defense of their efforts to get communal institutions to blackball Jews on the left.

No, the parallel is not exact — one could argue that Beinart is calling for an economic boycott on goods made by settlers, not a boycott of settlers speaking at Jewish institutions in the United States. But the parallel is close enough to change the terms of debate: It will no longer be about whether boycotting other Jews is kosher, but about which Jews we should be boycotting.