Jonathan Ophir (anti-racist Jewish Israeli musician, conductor and writer based in Denmark) (2020): “Peter Beinart, Prince of ‘Liberal-Zionism’, published a nearly 7K-word essay in Jewish Currents titled “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine”, explaining why he is abandoning the two-state solution. It was followed up by his much shorter piece in the New York Times titled “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State”. I don’t need to write an essay to explain just how deeply this cuts into the Zionist heart. Equality between Jews and Palestinians is anathema to Zionism, and abandoning the Jewish State is relinquishing the conceptual means by which this inequality is maintained. These advocacies in general are not novel. Many others as well as this writer have been making them for years. But the person who is now voicing them is part of this story which makes it that much more explosive. The prince has just abandoned the castle. Even though Beinart seems keen to soften the blow by suggesting that Zionism continue more as “essence” rather than “form”, that is, become a kind of cultural signifier without a Jewish nation-state as such, for Zionists today, this is still very much tantamount to a death blow… And if it’s Apartheid, no matter what you do, then it’s logical that the goal needs to change from managing it, to abolishing it. When the goal is abolishing it, then we are called on to imagine a future without Apartheid. This is where the “pragmatists” of the status quo orthodoxies will come in to demolish these imaginings as “unrealistic” or worse. People once talked that way about Apartheid South Africa, too, until it wasn’t Apartheid anymore” (Jonathan Ophir, “Peter Beinart’s defection is a desperate crisis for liberal Zionists”, Mondoweiss, 20 July 2020: https://mondoweiss.net/2020/07/peter-beinarts-defection-makes-liberal-zionists-reactionary/ ).