Author Daniel Gordis, Senior Vice President and Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem, accused liberal American Jewish columnist Peter Beinart of being a traitor to the Jewish people after Beinart wrote a column calling for the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
In an interview with the Jewish Broadcasting Service, Gordis said: "I think there’s something fundamentally immoral about it -- there is something that really is a betrayal of the Jewish People in a way that makes me, frankly, not angry but unbelievably sad."
Gordis noted that Beinart's position is in line with many anti-Semites. "Are you in the same camp as Ilhan Omar and in the same camp as Rashida Tlaib?" he asked. “Because if you are in that camp, then we should treat you the way we treat them – which is to say, hopefully not with disrespect – we call you an “enemy” of our people.”
"And here is what I would say a fundament of Jewish history is: 2,000 years of Jewish history prove that the Jewish People cannot live safely and securely without an independent sovereign state of their own in which they are responsible for their own destiny," he said.
Gordis called on the American Jewish community to shun Beinart the way it would shun a Holocaust denier.
He further stated that he would no longer be willing to sit on a stage with Beinart, with whom he has debated in the past.
Last week, Beinart published an Op Ed in the left-wing publication the Jewish Currents in which he wrote that he can no longer support the idea of a Jewish state and called for the creation of a binational state in place of Israel. A shorter version of the piece was published in the New York Times.
In his piece, titled 'Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine,' Beinart argued that the "essence of Zionism" was simply a home in the land of Israel, not the existence of a Jewish state.
"It’s time to explore other ways to achieve that goal—from confederation to a democratic binational state— that don’t require subjugating another people. It’s time to envision a Jewish home that is a Palestinian home, too," Beinart stated.
Beinart further stated that because of Israel's continued control of Judea and Samaria, "the price of a state that favors Jews over Palestinians is too high" and that liberal Zionism "has failed."
Beinart accused both Israeli and American Jews of wrongly associating Palestinian Arab resistance to Israel with the Nazi Holocaust and ascribing genocidal intentions to groups, in which he included the Hamas terrorist organization, which are merely seeking freedom and independence.
"Only by helping to free Palestinians—and in the process coming to see them as human beings, not the reincarnation of our tortured past—can we free ourselves from the Holocaust’s grip," he wrote.
Beinart's piece has generated controversy in the week since its publication, with critics accusing him of deliberately distorting facts and Jewish history, seeking to undemocratically impose his views on Jews and Arabs in the region who do not share his vision, downplaying the anti-Semitism behind much of the opposition to Israel, and proposing a solution which would lead to the expulsion and mass slaughter of the more than six million Jewish citizens of the State of Israel.