‘Failure of judgment’: Following backlash, Peter Beinart apologizes for speaking at Tel Aviv University

Peter Beinart, photographed early in 2025

Haaretz and Linda Dayan report in Haaretz on 26 November 2025:

Writer Peter Beinart, who spoke at an event in Tel Aviv University on Tuesday after saying he supports “many forms” of boycott against Israel, said that he “made a serious mistake” by participating in the event.

“I wanted to say certain things to an Israeli audience. Speaking at Tel Aviv University seemed to offer that chance,” he said. “I let my desire for that conversation override my solidarity with Palestinians, who in the face of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide have asked the world to boycott Israeli institutions that are complicit in their oppression.”

Beinart added that, as Palestinian intellectuals and activists have pointed out to him, “there are ways for me to talk to Israelis without violating BDS guidelines and undermining a collective effort against oppression.”

Beinart spoke at an event called “Trump, Israel and the Future of American Democracy,” billed as a conversation with the columnist moderated by Dr. Yoav Fromer of the university’s English and American Studies department.

On Tuesday, the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel released a formal condemnation of the American columnist, saying that his participation “can only be used to whitewash the unspeakable crimes committed by Israel and its institutions, including TAU, against Indigenous Palestinians.”

The BDS movement advocates for a strict boycott against Israeli educational institutions, including Tel Aviv University, citing ties between universities and the Israeli government, including through defense think tanks and research, as well as its scholarships for IDF soldiers.  It cites the presence of military and weapons contractors at job fairs as serving the nation’s military industrial complex.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the academic and cultural arm of the BDS movement, said that it had spoken to Beinart in private and urged him to reconsider the engagement.

Since the outbreak of the 2023 Gaza war, Beinart, an outspoken Jewish voice for Palestinian rights, has evolved into a fierce critic of Israel and has distanced himself from the liberal Zionist camp, which the movement called in its statement “a desperate attempt to make Israel’s Zionist regime of settler-colonialism, dehumanization, and elimination of the Palestinian natives seem palatable.”

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