Peter Beinart makes an extremely bad recommendation:
Instead, we should call the West Bank “nondemocratic Israel.”
Setting aside the question of Beinart’s call for a boycott of Israeli settlements for the moment, this rhetorical move is a terrible idea. No part of the West Bank is Israel, non-democratic or otherwise. That might change under some future diplomatic agreement, but at the moment Israeli territory ends where the West Bank begins. It is no less ridiculous for someone making an anti-settlement argument to create confusion on this point than it is when Santorum pretends that the West Bank is Israeli by right of conquest. The phrase doesn’t suggest that there are “two Israels.” It implies that occupied territory is the “non-democratic” part of Israel, which will hardly scandalize supporters of the settlements, and it undermines the argument against the illegality of the settlements by making it seem as if the main problem with the occupation is the non-democratic way that Israel administers the territory.
That’s an amazingly bad recommendation, even from Beinart, who seems to specialize in bad recommendations. You hear this suggestion occasionally from those favoring a one-state plan: that in effect the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean already makes up one large, undemocratic state, that the war that’s being fought over that territory is in effect a civil war, etc. It’s a stupid argument coming from that side, but the terminology is amazingly stupid coming from someone on Beinart’s side.
The call for a Zionist boycott movement is also a really bad idea (it’s Beinart’s!), even taking Beinart’s shallow, summer-camp Zionism at face value. While such a boycott movement is logically coherent, Beinart doesn’t seem to consider that protest movements aren’t always predictable. They don’t always go in the direction originally planned. All the internal political forces would tend to move a Zionist BDS movement towards an anti-Zionist BDS movement, exactly the position that Beinart is against.