News of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s late September speech before Jewish leaders in New York got me thinking about Peter Beinart’s latest piece from earlier that month in the New York Review of Books about American Jews and Israel. Beinart, formerly an editor of The New Republic, has billed this piece as the sequel to his 2010 NYRB piece which launched his crusade against the “American Jewish Establishment,” as he calls it. In the more recent piece, Beinart charges American Jewish elites as well as ordinary members of the community (he switches back and forth, making it hard to tell) with living in a self-imposed “closed intellectual space,” where voices not entirely supportive of hawkish Israeli policies are simply not heard.

It’s hard to think of a community in America with a more robust and diverse and self-critical intellectual space than that of American Jews, and it’s hard to conceive of a single issue on which this diversity—in all its contentious, maddeningly noisy glory—manifests itself more than on Israel. If the charge is that American Jews live in a cocoon on issues of concern to them, the first reasonable question needs to be, “Compared to what?” There are three approaches to answering that. One would be to compare American Jews to the pro-Palestinian political community, or alternatively to American Muslims or Arab-Americans. Another would be to compare it to diaspora communities which are partisans to other international conflicts. A third would be to invent some epistemic standard of what an open intellectual space should aspire to be, and compare the American Jewish community, with all the relevant caveats, to that. Beinart does none of these.

Beinart's first bit of evidence for the closed intellectual space that is not purely anecdotal is Hillel campus guidelines (non-binding, I assume) urging chapters not to host speakers who “deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders,” “delegitimize, demonize, or apply a double standard to Israel,” or “support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel.” I couldn’t find a single fault with these guidelines, but Beinart finds three. First, he argues, the guidelines are so vague they could conceivably bar any Palestinian or non-Palestinian critic of Israel. Vague compared to what? What guideline is less vague? To bolster this point he points out that even advocating the 1967 border might violate the “secure borders” standard according to Netanyahu. Are you following carefully? Israel’s prime minister has argued that the pre-1967 borders are not secure borders and Hillel urges not chapters not host speakers who “deny the right of Israel to exist [in] secure and recognized borders,” therefore, by Beinart’s impeccable logic, Hillel could be banning speakers who advocate a withdrawal to 1967 borders. Is that even a remotely plausible reading of this guideline? Has Beinart come across even one example, ever, of a speaker not being hosted by a Hillel because they advocated the 1967 borders? Then what is he talking about?

The second objection Beinart lodges is even more slippery. He notes that “even moderate[s]” like former Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad support boycotting settlements. It is Beinart himself who is always at pains to distinguish boycotting settlement products (good) from boycotting Israel (bad), but he suddenly forgets his own distinction. Again, has Fayyad or anyone remotely like him ever been banned from a Hillel? The third objection is that an Arab member of Knesset who even “presides over sessions of the Knesset” wants to remove Israel’s Jewish identity, and therefore he might not be allowed to speak at a Hillel function. Can anyone imagine a member of Knesset being turned away from a Hillel? Has this happened? All Beinart has done is present Hillel’s entirely reasonable sounding guidelines, mock them as vague where they are deliberately anodyne, and then proceed to give them the most uncharitable and radical interpretation possible. He provides exactly zero examples of anyone in Hillel or any other Jewish organization doing anything similar, but goes on to excoriate them based on his own extreme interpretation.

How does such a weak argument get made and become so resonant? I’ve identified four themes in Beinart’s writing on the topic that are particularly apparent in this most recent essay. First, he makes bold, sweeping judgments on little or no evidence, often with out-of-date and out-of-context quotes. He reaches back to 1989 to show that American Jews have no idea that Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis go to separate schools. What does this indicate? Some countries have dealt with national minorities by forcing them to be educated only in the majority language in state schools in hope of erasing their separate identity. This has never been the goal or the method of Israeli policy toward its large Arab minority (nearly 20 percent). Does Beinart wish it were? Otherwise what is the point of this datum?