The Middle East Media Sampler 3/19/2012: The Peter Beinart Principle

From DG:

1) The Peter Beinart Principle

Peter Beinart hoping to promote his recent book and latest project, has been given an op-ed at the New York Times to promote his views, To save Israel, boycott the settlements:

TO believe in a democratic Jewish state today is to be caught between the jaws of a pincer.
On the one hand, the Israeli government is erasing the “green line” that separates Israel proper from the West Bank. In 1980, roughly 12,000 Jews lived in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). Today, government subsidies have helped swell that number to more than 300,000. Indeed, many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all. 

In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the settlement of Ariel, which stretches deep into the West Bank, “the heart of our country.” Through its pro-settler policies, Israel is forging one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an entity of dubious democratic legitimacy, given that millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives. 

Beinart can argue "[t]hrough its pro-settler policies, Israel is forging one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea," but this premise is factually wrong.