The RP: The Crisis of Peter Beinart

I’m excited to share with you a piece I wrote that landed on the front page of today’s The Times of Israel.

It’s a book review of Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism.  My piece is entitled “The Crisis of Peter Beinart.”

While I want you to click here to read the article, I will offer two SPOILER ALERTS:

1. As the movie reviewers from In Living Color would say: “Hated it!”

2. This may be the first book review in history to quote Benjamin Netanyahu, Fredo Corleone, Emily Bronte, Three Dog Night, and Jerry McGuire.

An excerpt:

Within the aching, romantic heart of Peter Beinart lies an epic, tragic love story.

Beinart’s latest book, The Crisis of Zionism, begins as a tale of the author as a young boy, sitting at the knee of his immigrant grandmother, falling in love with her utopian vision of their ancestral homeland, a nation of liberal values and the moral pursuit of peace.  You had me at “Shalom”!

But recently, upon receipt of a mysterious video — featuring a young boy mourning the arrest of his Palestinian father — our heroic narrator removes his devotion-inspired blinders, and his now-unjaundiced eyes reveal a long trail of illiberal betrayal by the wholly hole-y Holy Land.

But rather than retreat, our author sets out instead to reform his unfaithful love. With a self-image of Biblical proportions, Beinart likens himself to the Hebrew Prophets who decried the misuse of power the last time the Jews ran Israel.

Alas…this Jeremiah is a bullfrog.

Like many works in the kiss-and-tell genre, The Crisis of Zionism is driven by emotion rather than fact, and is so transparently one-sided that it reveals that the true betrayer is the author himself.  Beinart is like Heathcliff, whose misinformed, misguided abandonment of his true love damns the couple to tragedy.  Or perhaps he’s Fredo, whose thwarted ambition leads him on the path to perfidy, enabling and empowering his family’s enemies. You broke my heart, Peter.  You broke my heart.

Click here to read the full review.