Short answer: No. As of August 2026, Peter Beinart does not support the State of Israel as currently constituted. The American Jewish writer and CUNY journalism professor started out as a liberal Zionist critic of the occupation, but by 2020 he had publicly renounced belief in a Jewish state, and since the Gaza war his positions have hardened further, including apologizing in late 2025 for speaking at an Israeli university.
What Peter Beinart has actually said and done
June 10, 2010: Beinart published "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" in The New York Review of Books, arguing that American Jewish institutions were alienating young Jews by refusing to criticize Israel's occupation of the West Bank. At this point he still identified as a liberal Zionist calling for reform, not abandonment, of Zionism.
April 3, 2012: In an interview with NPR, Beinart proposed a boycott limited to goods made in West Bank settlements, which he called "Zionist BDS." He explicitly distinguished this from, and rejected, the broader Palestinian-led BDS movement targeting all of Israel, which he described as an effort to dismantle the Jewish state.
July 8, 2020: Beinart's New York Times opinion essay, "I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State," marked his public break with mainstream Zionism. He renounced his earlier two-state position and called instead for an equal single state or confederation between Israelis and Palestinians. The essay drew sharp criticism, which the Algemeiner covered in detail; the American Council for Judaism published commentary quoting the essay at length.
January 2025: Beinart published the book "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning," a sustained argument that American Jews must reckon with Israel's conduct in the Gaza war. Reviewers, as summarized on Wikipedia's page on the book, described it as his final break with Zionism.
November 25, 2025: Beinart spoke at a Tel Aviv University event titled "Trump, Israel, and the Future of American Democracy," organized through the university's English department. The appearance drew criticism from pro-boycott activists on the left, as reported by The Times of Israel.
November 26, 2025: Beinart publicly apologized on X for the Tel Aviv University appearance, calling it "a serious mistake" and "a failure of judgment." According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he said he should have honored Palestinian calls to boycott Israeli institutions he described as complicit in "ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide." Haaretz independently reported the same apology.
March 31, 2026: Beinart's book "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza" won the PEN America Literary Award for nonfiction at the PEN America 62nd Annual Literary Awards in New York. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that judges praised the book for offering "a model for writing a new story when inherited narratives no longer hold."
Where Peter Beinart stands today
Beinart is an American Jewish writer, raised in a Zionist household, and an observant Jew who keeps Shabbat and writes from within Jewish religious and communal tradition. His Jewish identity has never been in question. He currently serves as editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY.
His trajectory has moved in one direction for sixteen years: from a liberal Zionist urging Israel to end the West Bank occupation (2010), to proposing a narrow settlement-goods boycott while still rejecting broader anti-Israel BDS (2012), to publicly renouncing belief in a Jewish state and endorsing a single binational state (2020), to writing that American Jews must reckon with what he calls the "destruction of Gaza" (2025), to apologizing for speaking at an Israeli university on the grounds that doing so violated Palestinian-led calls to boycott Israeli institutions (November 2025). He now uses the term "Jewish supremacy" to characterize current Israeli policy toward Palestinians.
There is no verified record of Beinart donating to Israeli causes, appearing at pro-Israel events, or otherwise materially supporting Israel. His public actions run the other direction: support for boycotting Israeli institutions and outright opposition to Zionism as a concept.
The bottom line
Peter Beinart does not support the current State of Israel as constituted. He was once a self-described liberal Zionist critical of the occupation, but by mid-2020 he had publicly renounced belief in a Jewish state altogether, and since the Gaza war his positions have hardened further: he has all but abandoned the two-state solution, describes Israeli policy using the phrase "Jewish supremacy," and in November 2025 apologized for having spoken at Tel Aviv University at all. He remains an identifying, observant Jew, but that religious identity is now separate from, and in tension with, support for Israel as a state.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
