Op-Ed: Here’s What The Left Gets Wrong About Benjamin Netanyahu’s Vision For Israel

This article originally appeared in Daily Caller on June 16, 2023

Israel has recently been the target of a new wave of attacks, much of it relating to the Left’s disappointment in the return of Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-leaning coalition.

Netanyahu’s policy efforts to reform Israel’s judiciary — changes that would make it more similar to the Supreme Court of the United States, such as separation of branches of government — became a lightning rod for his American critics, who cited it as an example of Netanyahu’s “authoritarianism.”

It is one thing for the Biden administration to throw mud at foreign governments that do not share its politics. It is another when leftist grievances enter America’s intellectual mainstream.

An example is the May/June 2023 issue of Foreign Affairs, which features an article with the unambiguous title, “Israel’s One-State Reality: It’s Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution.” Two of its authors are friends from whom I have learned a great deal over the years in addressing our shared academic focus of political Islam.

The piece advocates for doing away with the expressions “two-state solution” and “peace process.” But not because these policies have failed. Rather, as the authors write, because those policies begin “from a one-state reality” — viz. Israel — “that is morally reprehensible and strategically costly.” In other words, the world must only recognize a Palestinian state, not Israel.

The piece appears to be based on the following assumption: “Israel no longer even pretends to maintain liberal aspirations. The United States does not have ‘shared values’ and should not have ‘unbreakable bonds’ with a state that discriminates against or abuses millions of its residents based on their ethnicity and religion.”

Read full op-ed in Daily Caller