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Beinart’s Self-Defeating Recommendation

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 […]

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.

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