Peter Beinart is speaking in Israel. Cue criticism from both the left and the right.

JTA – Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart drew a volley of criticism on Tuesday, 25 November, from the boycott Israel movement as well as a right-wing Israeli group over an appearance at Tel Aviv University (TAU). 

Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, spoke on Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv with Yoav Fromer, a senior faculty member at TAU’s English department, in an event titled “Trump, Israel, and the Future of American Democracy.” 

A founding member of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement publicly called on Beinart to cancel his visit after saying it had privately urged him to do so. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is the BDS movement’s cultural arm and a leading advocate for boycotts of Israeli academic institutions. 

“Palestinians condemn Peter Beinart’s event at complicit Tel Aviv University in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” PACBI said in a post on X. “Whitewashing genocide can never be reconciled with any claim to humanism or moral consistency.” 

In a press release, PACBI accused the university of being “deeply complicit in enabling and trying to whitewash Israel’s United States-armed and funded genocide as well as its decades old regime of settler-colonialism, military occupation, and apartheid.” 

Beinart declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But he responded to the criticism on social media, where said he supports a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as well as a right of return for Palestinians and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, all principles of the BDS movement to which he has long subscribed. 

At the same time, he said, while he supports “many forms of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel and Israeli institutions”, he believes there is “value in speaking to Israelis about Israel’s crimes” by speaking at universities. 

“I do so because I want to reach Jews who disagree with me because I believe that by trying to convince Jews to rethink their support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, I can contribute, in some very small way, to the struggle for freedom and justice,” Beinart wrote. 

The author of several books including Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, published earlier this year, Beinart is also scheduled to speak at Hebrew University later this week, according to Haaretz. 

Beinart also wrote that “right-wing Israeli organisations have pressured Tel Aviv University to cancel my talk”, and that he felt he should “take advantage of this opportunity to say in Israel what I’ve been saying elsewhere for the last two years”. 

Matan Jerafi, the chief executive of the right-wing Israeli activist group Im Tirtzu, sent a letter to TAU’s president, Ariel Porat, on Tuesday, urging him to cancel the event, according to Israel National News. 

“Why is he hosting someone on his campus who does not recognise the state of Israel and calls for sanctions against Israel?” wrote Jerafi. “We call on Mr Porat to cancel this absurd event. Stop tarnishing the reputation of Israeli academia. This is not Columbia University.”