Peter Beinart argues that the Left's antizionism is different from the Right's. It isn't. 

 

Peter Beinart’s latest piece in the New York Times makes the argument that right-wing anti-Zionism is genuinely antisemitic because it roots Israel’s behavior in Jewish identity, while left-wing anti-Zionism is morally serious because it roots Israel’s behavior in systems — colonialism, nationalism, and power. Tucker Carlson blames Israel’s crimes on its Jewishness; progressives analyze structures. Therefore, Beinart suggests, the two are categorically different, and the progressive arguments are serious and fact-based.

The argument is superficially appealing, but it confuses vocabulary with logic. Both versions of anti-Zionism, right and left, turn out to depend on the same underlying antisemitic premise: that Jews cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

The left’s central accusations against Israel are claims about intent, not descriptions of behavior. Genocide requires the intent to destroy a people. Apartheid requires the intent to permanently dominate. Colonialism requires the intent to displace and replace. If your evidence for those accusations is based on reading minds, it is not evidence — unless there is no other credible explanation.

 There is one, and it is far more credible. The left’s explanation — deliberate targeting, racial domination, eliminationist expansionism — requires attributing to Israel a set of intentions that Israel explicitly denies and that the historical and strategic evidence does not support. Israel’s explanation fits the facts better: Israel is a Jewish state built by a people who internalized two thousand years of antisemitism as lived experience rather than historical abstraction, whose founding principle of Never Again functions as an operational imperative rather than an empty slogan, and whose moral framework derives from three thousand years of Jewish ethical thinking that the West itself largely inherited — and that the left applies selectively, inverting it against its source.

 That last point matters more than it usually gets credit for. Israel is not a state that is indifferent to civilian casualties. It is a state whose entire military and legal culture is organized around minimizing them, because that is what its moral tradition demands. The IDF’s doctrine of purity of arms, the military advocate general’s office, the post-operation investigations, the evacuation warnings that forfeit tactical surprise — these are the institutional expression of a moral seriousness that runs through Jewish law on the conduct of war. And they are precisely why Hamas uses human shields. That strategy only works because Hamas correctly calculates that Israel will accept higher costs rather than kill civilians indiscriminately. An army with genocidal intent does not generate that calculation in its enemies; it generates the opposite one.

 What the left consistently refuses to recognize is that Israel is not choosing between war and peace. It is choosing between two moral costs: accept civilian casualties in Gaza while fighting an enemy that has made those casualties structurally unavoidable, or allow that enemy to terrorize Israeli civilians forever and with impunity