And the Schmegegge of the Year Award Goes to… PETER BEINART!
As 2022 ends, it is time to hand out our “Schmegegge of the Year Award” to the most deserving anti-Zionist.
A “Schmegegge” (pronounced shmeh-GEH-gee) is an American-Yiddish expression meaning a very foolish, untalented, maladroit, dimwitted person. As it is the JSZN mission to counteract academic foolishness in the discussion of Israel, we have decided to bestow this distinction every year upon the person who has done more than anyone else to proliferate utter nonsense about Israel and Zionism.
There have been many worthy candidates this year who through their words and actions have proven to be deserving of the honor. Although it was difficult to narrow the finalists down to just one person, the JSZN coordinating committee has unanimously decided that the 2022 award for “Schmegegge of the Year” will go to Peter Beinart.
Formerly the editor-in-chief of the New Republic, Beinart now regularly contributes inane ideas to many of the largest media outlets in the country, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, and CNN. He has also entered academia at the City University of New York, where he has remained silent in the face of troubling prejudice against Zionist students and faculty He is also currently the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, the flagship periodical of the anti-Zionist Jewish radical Left.
Here are some examples of Beinart’s most ludicrous remarks:
In Jewish Currents, he wrote, “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality. This doesn’t require abandoning Zionism. It requires reviving an understanding of it that has largely been forgotten. It requires distinguishing between form and essence. The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that both offers Jews refuge and enriches the entire Jewish world.”
In other words, Beinart truly believes that sharing a state with another nation is consistent with national self-determination. Putting aside the fact that these are proven to be mutually opposite concepts (he seems to have slept through the Balkan wars of the 1990s), and putting aside the fact that the Jews have built, owned, resided on, worked on, and defended their own national homeland for 75 years, where does Beinart call upon the Palestinians to abandon their desire for a state of their own to share a single land with the Jews? Where shall the Jews be, if Palestine is free from the river to the sea?
Beinart has also called for the nuclear dismantling of Israel, while shrugging off the dangers of a nuclear Iran. “This deceit,” by which he means a U.S. government’s double standard for Israel and Iran on nuclear statuses, “undercuts America’s supposed commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and it distorts the American debate over Iran.” But Beinart foolishly fails to mention that Israel has never vowed to use its nuclear capabilities aggressively, whereas Iran has made it clear that it intends to use them to drive the Jews in the sea, which may very well transpire, should Palestine be free from the river to the sea.
And finally, Beinart made perhaps his most “schmegegge move” by signing the statement in support of the anti-Semitic UN envoy, Francesca Albanese, who had connected the U.S.’s support of Israel to the “Jewish lobby” controlling the American government. The statement insists that Albanese’s claim (drawn from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and without a single footnote) was taken out of context.
Indeed, as scholars we affirm that context is everything, and in the context of Zionist politics, we declare Peter Beinart to be the “Schmegegge of the Year.”