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February 27th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
The headquarters of The New York Times. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
New York Times columnist Peter Beinart is defending himself against the charge that he is a hypocrite for favoring economic sanctions against Israeli Jewish settlers on the West Bank while opposing them against Iranian terrorists and human rights abusers.
A February opinion piece by Beinart in the New York Times called for easing sanctions on Iran, Syria, and North Korea. The Algemeiner published a column pointing out that the article left Beinart “in the awkward position of opposing sanctions on terror-sponsoring Iran but supporting them on Israelis who live in Hebron or suburbs of Jerusalem.”
Beinart replied with two tweets.
The first tried to draw a distinction between what he called “secondary sanctions” and the sanctions he favors against Israeli settlers.
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February 26, 2021 12:36 pm
“My NYT oped is about ‘secondary sanctions’ — sanctions on any entity that does business with a besieged country, thus denying its people even basic humanitarian goods. I’ve never suggested anything close to that regarding Israel. Come on guys, do better,” Beinart tweeted.
The second minimized his call for sanctions against Israeli settlers. “1) I’ve never called for ‘secondary sanctions’ on Israel — the topic of my oped. 2) I didn’t write an ‘entire book’ calling for a boycott. It’s a few pages near the end. As an editor you’re supposed to try to get facts right even when it’s inconvenient. Try harder,” he tweeted.
Neither of these defenses is particularly strong. Beinart’s New York Times op-ed wasn’t headlined “Why Secondary Sanctions Are Bad But Primary Sanctions Are Okay.” It was headlined, “America’s Other Forever War; The United States doesn’t just bomb its enemies. It chokes them.” Many of the arguments he makes in the column against sanctions — they don’t succeed, they harm innocent civilians — apply to both kinds. That may be why he didn’t crisply distinguish between the two in the column.
I dug into this issue in the mid-1990s as Congress considered the Iran Libya Sanctions Act pushed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and by Senator Alfonse D’Amato, a Republican who represented New York. Senator D’Amato and Aipac realized that to defund Iranian terrorism, it wasn’t sufficient merely to prevent Americans from buying Iranian oil and gas. To really stanch the flow of funds to the Iranian nuclear program and to Iranian terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, America had to block other oil and gas companies such as France’s Total from investing in Iran. Otherwise the sanctions would be pointless and self-defeating — depriving American companies of business opportunities without depriving the Iranian regime of foreign currency.
Without secondary sanctions, American economic punishment would be mere virtue signaling. Beinart’s fallback position of only being for primary sanctions but not for secondary sanctions doesn’t make much sense. No wonder that wasn’t really the gist of his Times column. It would be ironic if the foreign policy Left that includes by Beinart — which favors multilateralism, alliances, and cooperation on most matters — prefers American economic sanctions be unilateral rather than broadly enforced.
As for Beinart’s claim that his push for a boycott of the Israeli settlements was merely “a few pages near the end,” Beinart displayed no such compunction when, in conjunction with the book’s release, he got a lot of press coverage about the sanctions call.
One 28-minute NPR “Fresh Air” segment was headlined, “Should American Jews Boycott West Bank Settlements?” It reported, “In his book The Crisis of Zionism and in a recent New York Times op-ed, Beinart has proposed a boycott of goods made in those Jewish settlements.” Beinart was not then heard publicly protesting to NPR that it was just “a few pages near the end.” A companion NPR piece reported, “In his book and in a recent New York Times op-ed, Beinart has proposed a boycott of goods made in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” The Beinart New York Times op-ed timed to the book’s release was headlined “To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements.” Beinart was not then heard publicly protesting to the New York Times headline writers that the boycott call was just “a few pages near the end.” In any case, nonfiction books often reach their conclusions, and their main points, “near the end.”
And as the Algeimeiner column pointed out, the book is not the only venue Beinart in which has called for such a boycott; he reiterated the boycott call in a 2016 letter in the New York Review of Books headlined, “For an Economic Boycott and Political Nonrecognition of the Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Territories.” He wrote then, in a letter signed with others, “we call for a targeted boycott of all goods and services from all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, and any investments that promote the Occupation, until such time as a peace settlement is negotiated between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. We further call upon the US government to exclude settlements from trade benefits accorded to Israeli enterprises, and to strip all such Israeli entities in the West Bank from the tax exemptions that the Internal Revenue Service currently grants to American nonprofit tax-exempt organizations. The objects of our call are all commercial and residential Israeli-sponsored entities located outside the 1949 Green Line.”
Does Beinart disagree that his latest column would have been a better one if some editor had added a self-aware sentence or two? Such as sentence might have said, some people may find it hypocritical that I am calling for easing sanctions in Iran when I have advocated a boycott of the West Bank. Actually. I’ve never called for a siege including secondary sanctions on the West Bank, and I’d be fine if the US wanted to boycott Iran on its own the way we should be boycotting the West Bank? That paragraph is not there.
The context in which to read the Beinart article is that of a concerted campaign to ease sanctions on Iran, a full-court-press campaign that includes yet another op-ed in the February 25 Times faulting Trump for “imposing draconian sanctions on Iran.”
The maximum pressure campaign to ease the sanctions may already be succeeding, at least in part — there are reports that Korea is releasing some of the $7 billion or $8 billion in Iranian funds frozen by American sanctions in Korean banks, notwithstanding ongoing Iranian attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.
Those like Peter Beinart can draw fine distinctions between secondary and primary sanctions. But to Jews or Americans or Israelis who will be killed by bombs and missiles that will be built with those billions of dollars, it will make no difference whether the Iranian money that pays for the weapons came from a Koran bank or an American one. The targets of Iranian terrorism will be just as dead either way.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
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