Beinart: Boycott settlements but buy from Israel

As he gears up for the release of his next book, former New Republic editor Peter Beinart has taken to the New York Times op-ed page with a succinctly headlined suggestion: “To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements.”

The piece precedes the March 27 publication of “The Crisis of Zionism,” in which Beinart criticizes Israeli settlement policy — and what he sees as the American Jewish establishment’s complicity in it. (The Times of Israel will post a Q&A with Beinart on the day of the book’s release; feel free to suggest questions for Beinart below.)

In his Times op-ed, Beinart says the area currently controlled by Israel should be called by two names: the “flawed but genuine democracy” within Israel’s original borders, and an “ethnically-based nondemocracy” in what’s more widely known as the West Bank.

As its title suggests, the essay calls on readers — specifically American Jews — to boycott goods produced in “nondemocratic Israel,” while at the same time urging them to “spend money we’re not spending on settler goods on those produced” within the country’s original borders. Such a plan, he writes, would encourage Israelis to withdraw from the West Bank, thereby securing the country’s Jewish and democratic future.

“Boycotting other Jews is a painful, unnatural act. But the alternative is worse,” writes Beinart, who describes himself as a “committed Jew” with membership at an Orthodox synagogue.

The op-ed has surely unleashed a flood of letters to the editor; Beinart’s opponents have been preparing arguments of their own since the publication of “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” a 2010 New York Review of Books essay that forms a partial basis for Beinart’s new book.