Peter Beinart’s latest New York Times essay warns about the way Tucker Carlson speaks about Israel and Jewishness. Beinart himself noted that the essay appeared in the Times this week under the title “What Tucker Carlson Means When He Talks About Israel." On the surface, the concern is not absurd. Jews should never allow antisemites, isolationists, or conspiracy theorists to define Jewish identity.
But Beinart’s warning exposes a deeper paradox, one for which he, too, bears responsibiility. For years, some Jewish intellectuals, Beinart among them, have helped create the ideological environment in which Israel is treated not as a flawed democratic nation-state confronting implacable enemies, but as a uniquely illegitimate enterprise whose Jewish character is itself the problem. When that argument migrates from elite journals and university panels into the vocabulary of Israel’s enemies, no one should pretend to be shocked.
The phenomenon is not new.
As early as May 1, 1936, Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked whether there was another people whose sons were so emotionally twisted that they considered everything their own nation did despicable, while murder, rape, and robbery committed by their enemies filled them with admiration. He warned that a Jewish child could come to the Land of Israel and “catch the virus of self-hate."
Katznelson was not describing ordinary criticism. Zionism has always contained fierce internal argument. Jews have never needed lessons in dissent. The issue is not whether Israel may be criticized. Of course it may be. The issue is what happens when criticism - Jewish and non-Jewish - becomes compulsion; when the Jewish state is judged by standards applied to no other nation; when its enemies are romanticized; and when Jewish survival itself is recast as a moral offense.
That is the pathology.
Beinart once supported a two-state solution. He has since argued that it is time to abandon the idea of a Jewish state and imagine “a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state." In a 2025 New York Times essay titled “States Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People Do," he advanced an argument Israel’s enemies have made for generations: that Jewish sovereignty is not a moral necessity but an obstacle to justice. The prestige of the New York Times gives that argument a polite vocabulary. It does not make it new.
The same pattern appears in the rhetoric of Judith Butler, Jewish American feminist, queer philosopher, and gender studies scholar. After the Hamas massacre of October 7, Butler called the attack “anguishing" and “terrible," but insisted it should be understood as “armed resistance," not terrorism and not antisemitism. That formulation did not merely contextualize Hamas’s crimes; it morally reorganized them. The victims became representatives of a “violent state apparatus," and the perpetrators became actors in an anti-colonial drama.
This is how moral inversion works. The slaughtered Jew is no longer a victim. He is transformed into a symbol of power. The murderer is no longer a murderer. He is transformed into an expression of historical grievance.
The late Tony Judt offered another version of the same argument when he declared the Jewish state an “anachronism." For anti-Zionist historian Judt, the very idea of a Jewish state belonged to another era. But this claim has always been selective. Nation-states organized around language, history, religion, and majority culture exist across Europe and the Middle East. Only Jewish national self-determination is treated by these Jewish intellectuals as uniquely embarrassing, uniquely outdated, and uniquely in need of dissolution.
That is not liberal universalism. It is selective universalism deployed against one people.
In 2009, Israeli attorney Uri Silber called this phenomenon the “Jew Flu," a strange illness of Jewish antisemitism that had mutated into anti-Zionist and post-Zionist forms. Silber argued that this vociferous minority wildly exaggerates Israel’s sins, real or imagined, while excusing or rationalizing Palestinian Arab violence and antisemitism against Jews. The phrase is deliberately provocative, but it captures something real: a recurring pattern in which some Jews seek moral purification by separating themselves from the Jewish collective under attack.
This should not be confused with clinical illness. Political and moral corruption are not psychiatric diagnoses. But they do have a psychology.
Dr. Kenneth Levin, in “The Canary on the Couch: The Psychology of Jewish Self-Delusions in the Face of Rising Antisemitism," examines how minority communities under pressure can respond by accommodating the prejudices of their surrounding culture.
For some Jewish intellectuals, the psychological payoff is obvious. By denouncing Israel more harshly than its enemies do, they gain admission into progressive circles where Zionism is treated as a moral stain. They become the “good Jews" in rooms where Jewish peoplehood is tolerated only when stripped of sovereignty, power, and self-defense.
Their dissent becomes a credential. Their alienation becomes a brand.
That is why the phrase “as a Jew" has become so useful. It functions as a permission slip. It allows a Jewish critic to say what Israel’s enemies want said, while insulating the statement from the charge of antisemitism. The Jewish identity of the speaker becomes the rhetorical shield behind which anti-Zionist arguments advance.
None of this means Jews must defend every Israeli policy. Israel is a real country, not a theological abstraction. Its governments make mistakes. Its leaders may be criticized. Its military actions may be scrutinized. Israelis themselves do this every day with a ferocity that would shock most other societies.
But there is a profound difference between criticizing Israel’s policies and denying the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty. There is a difference between demanding moral accountability and joining a campaign whose practical result would be the end of the one Jewish state. There is a difference between self-criticism and self-erasure.
A. B. Yehoshua understood this danger. In 1987, he warned against self-criticism untempered by self-respect and political honesty. He said he decided to judge Israel by the same standards he used for the rest of the world, not by impossible absolute standards. He feared Jewish self-hatred because, unlike the self-hatred of Englishmen or Frenchmen, Jewish self-hatred in Israel could be exploited by enemies who sought the country’s destruction.
That remains the central point.
When English intellectuals denounce England, England does not disappear. When French intellectuals denounce France, France is not placed on trial as an illegitimate state. But when Jewish intellectuals denounce Israel as uniquely racist, uniquely colonial, and uniquely anachronistic, they do so in a world where Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, PA Arabs and much of the international left already seek Israel’s isolation, weakening, and eventual elimination.
In that context, Jewish anti-Zionism is not merely another opinion. It is a strategic asset for those who want the Jewish state dismantled.
The tragedy is not that Jews criticize Israel. A nation that cannot tolerate criticism is morally brittle. The tragedy is that some Jews have confused criticism with contempt, universalism with surrender, and moral seriousness with the public performance of Jewish shame.
Beryl Katznelson saw the danger in 1936. A. B. Yehoshua saw it in 1987. We see it again now, amplified by elite universities, prestige media, activist foundations, and social platforms that reward Jews for indicting their own people in the language of their enemies, identifying with those enemies and joining in their hatred.
The question is not whether dissent is allowed. The question is whether dissent remains tethered to truth, responsibility, and Jewish survival.
When it is not, it ceases to be dissent.
It becomes pathology.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and serves on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel.