Key Takeaways:
- Brad Lander’s trip to the West Bank to participate in the olive harvest and subsequent detention follows a predictable pattern of far-left political pandering.
- Peter Beinart’s defense of Lander compared the NYC politician to the Jews who went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, hijacking the legitimacy of Black rights heroes and stories.
- By using civil rights champions as a tool to promote anti-Israel activism, Beinart denigrates the nobility of the movement and downplays Palestinian belligerency.
Brad Lander, the onetime New York City Comptroller set to represent New York’s 10th District in Congress next year, was in the West Bank yesterday where he was detained by the IDF for aiding an unauthorized olive harvest by local Palestinians. Lander, a strident Israel critic and supporter of New York’s anti-Zionist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, was accompanied by a group of like-minded rabbis and volunteers on what has become a pilgrimage of sorts for left-leaning Democrats.
The pandering political Haj has a predictable pattern: Arrive in Israel; performatively partake in a Palestinian harvest or protest; get apprehended by Israeli forces — and promote your time in custody to a global media eager for yet another example of Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria. Back in July, Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) pulled a similar stunt and was detained by both armed settlers and the IDF.
With media coverage in outlets ranging from Al Jazeera to The Wall Street Journal, Lander’s gimmicky West Bank pop-up achieved its desired intention. It also provoked social media posts from sympathetic anti-Israel types – the most cringey, of those from author and columnist Peter Beinart.
Beinart’s Abuse of History
Never one to miss an opportunity to descend ever further into anti-Zionist odiousness, Beinart was on X responding to the Lander melee – along with the media circus that burst forth around it. His choicest response was to Yaakov Katz, a fellow writer whose recent book “While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East” offered an unsparing critique of Israeli intelligence and military failures that led up to the October 7 massacre.
Katz blasted Lander on X, branding him a “provocateur…looking for a spectacle to burnish his far-left credentials.” But he also chided the IDF for indulging Lander’s juvenile theatrics and turning him into a “victim of Israeli aggression, which is exactly the image he came looking for.” Seems like a reasonable, if not — as the woke-folk might say — equitable response. Both sides should cease with the game-playing and get back to the real work of governing.
But that wasn’t enough for Beinart, whose response not only questioned Katz’s moral compass, but framed his rightly cynical analysis as akin to “looking at the Jews who went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer and asking: What’s their real angle?”
There is nothing virtue-seeking anti-Zionist Jews like more than aligning with the historic struggles of African-Americans. And no anti-Zionist Jew is chasing virtue harder than Beinart. And why not? Invoke MLK and Mississippi — Rose Parks or the Freedom Ride — and you immediately front as the “right” kind of Jew. The Jew who concedes his economic comfort, acknowledges his #whiteprivilege and is willing to sacrifice his own faith — his own peoplehood — at the altar of a ruthless identity-politics industry that ultimately wants us dead (or at least deeply disempowered).
Much like Mamdani — ever-evoking the struggles of the “black and brown” masses — Beinart is a master at manipulating the Black experience for his own craven gain. In this case, to place him on a moral high ground of racial reckoning and reconciliation — while Katz stands in opposition, soulless, and unenlightened, most crucially when it comes to Palestinian pain.
The problem here — and there are many — is not only does Beinart not understand Palestinian pain, he has no conception of the Black pain he so blithely co-opts with scant regard for cause or consequence.
Respecting The African American Civil Rights Struggle
To break it down simply for Beinart to understand: Brad Lander has nothing to do with the Blacks and Jews who marched down to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 — because the Palestinians, and their quest for “liberation,” have nothing to do with the African-American Civil Rights struggle.
If one wants to make room for minority stories; elevate lived experiences – prioritize Black voices. So stop clacking for a second and listen to this Black (and Jewish) voice! Some seven decades ago, my own father battled to desegregate his South Texas elementary school and was met by violent white supremacists committed to keeping him very separate and very unequal.
But my father — and my aunt and thousands of other brave and truly virtuous young people — did not respond with kidnappings and suicide bombings like the Palestinians that Beinart so self-indulgently champions. Nor did their Caucasian comrades — who were equally honorable and often Jewish —march alongside them, like Lander and Greta Thunberg and their preening, flotilla-folly ilk, to score media hits and image inflation.
These are among the many reasons why the condition of Palestinians in the West Bank, as Beinart further contended on X yesterday, is not “worse” than that of Blacks in Jim Crow Mississippi; African-Americans marched in response to a lack of rights and equality; the Palestinians – failed by their cunning and short-sighted leadership – are the architects of their own misfortune.
Indeed, the only thing less honorable than Lander and his simping solidarity quest is Beinart, using it to curry favor with the woke elite who cover his paychecks. Because what Beinart does not — cannot and could never — understand is that he dishonors the nobility and nonviolence of the Black Civil Rights struggle every time he equates it with #palestine.
So I am appealing to Beinart directly: Stop — just stop!
As an actual African-American, I don’t need his manufactured alignment or cheesy, intersectional coalition-building. Because we, as Black people, have nothing to do with the Palestinians, no matter how hard they try to hijack our history. And Brad Lander is nothing like those Freedom Marchers, because Palestine today is nothing like Jim Crow Mississippi.
No Jew Can Escape Antisemitism
Ultimately, I would also ask Peter to truly consider the damage men like Lander, and yes, Beinart himself, inflict upon the Jewish people in our most vulnerable moment in nearly a century. Take it from the Black guy — Jew-to-Jew — there is nothing noble or virtuous about the cause of anti-Zionism. It’s a hate movement as venal and deadly as White supremacy or anti-Black racism.
Surely Beinart would speak out against those very real injustices — it’s time for him to speak out just as forcefully against the injustices against Zionism that happen everywhere and every day.
Because no matter how hard you #pimpforgaza, you can’t opt out of antisemitism — no Jew can — prejudice just doesn’t work that way. Of course Beinart will insist that there’s a vast difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. But listen to someone who’s known hate far more deeply than he ever has; the Jew-hatred is all the same — for him, for me and for Brad Lander.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
