Israel News, Tuesday, 25.11.2025  
  Faced with deepening isolation, Israelis risk becoming more militant, more insular and more reactive to any force they perceive as a threat. The goal, then, seems to be to turn Israel into the worst version of itself  Linda Dayan


 Jewish American journalist and academic Peter Beinart thought it necessary to lay out his anti-Zionist bona fides via a social media post on Tuesday: He supports the right of return for Palestinians, an end to the occupation, a boycott of Israeli institutions, the ousting of Israelis from international sports and culture, the restriction – if not end – of U.S. arms sales to Israel. These firmly held beliefs are ones he has vocally and publicly expressed, but they did not stop him from receiving a personal condemnation from the BDS movement itself.

Beinart held a talk at Tel Aviv University on Tuesday and is set to speak at Hebrew University later this week. “I believe there is value in speaking to Israelis about Israel’s crimes,” he wrote in the post defending his decision to hold these engagements in Israel. In spending years talking to Jews about the treatment of Palestinians, “I have conducted public discussions with many people whose views I consider immoral and spoken at many institutions that are based on principles with which I profoundly disagree. These include institutions like Tel Aviv University that are in various ways complicit in Israeli oppression.”

This explanation did not sate the BDS movement, which on Tuesday wrote that it had privately urged Beinart to cancel his Israeli events in line with their demands. According to the movement’s Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, collaborating with an Israeli educational institution in any capacity is strictly verboten. Now, it calls on him publicly to “immediately cancel this unethical, unjustifiable engagement that, regardless of its content, can only be used to whitewash the unspeakable crimes committed by Israel and its institutions, including TAU, against Indigenous [sic] Palestinians.”

Beinart’s goal with his Israel speaking tour seems to be auditoriums full of Israeli students suddenly weeping and burning their military reservist IDs due to the cutting words of the American who finally opened their eyes to the sins of their people and themselves. More likely, he will preach to a left-wing academic choir (who are already hosting talks of similar substance themselves), and the right-wing Im Tirtzu activists picketing it from afar.

But it is even less plausible that BDS will achieve its goal here. Regardless of Beinart’s appearance on its campus, Tel Aviv University is no more likely to sever its ties with Israeli government institutions than American universities are to cut theirs with the U.S. government – that is, not at all.

Further, if Israeli academia, culture and industry were choked off by a united international boycott, it is hard to imagine Israelis packing up and abandoning their own self-determination. As history on both sides of Israel’s 1967 borders has proven, if a nation is set on determining its own destiny, no amount of force – occupation, blockade, discrimination, foreign pressure – will force them to abandon it.

Faced with deepening isolation, Israelis risk becoming more militant, more insular and more reactive to any force they perceive as a threat. The goal, then, seems to be to turn Israel into the worst version of itself: a nation where international perspectives are blocked out.

This is a product both of a government that has trained its sights on press freedom and free expression, as well as of foreign intellectuals, artists and public figures who treat Israeliness as if it were a contagious disease. Once again, the anti-Israel left abroad and the Israeli government appear aligned in one aim: keeping Israelis inside a narrowing, resentful echo chamber.