I have the answer to Jon Stewart’s toughest question about Israel
How can you talk to friends who disagree with you about Israel? By focusing on the future
Jon Stewart June 7 in Los Angeles. Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Comedy Central
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman July 30, 2025
Jon Stewart wants to know: How can he speak with people who hate what he says about Israel?
That’s not the most urgent conversation to have about the graveyard that is Gaza right now — the hostages, hunger, mass destruction, and endless war come to mind — but I get it. For Jews who are having close relationships torn apart because of differences over Israel, that question is a deeply personal one. The fact that the close Jewish friends with whom Stewart argues about Israel include the likes of Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t make those arguments any less painful.
And I, as opposed to Stewart’s guest, the Jewish writer and activist Peter Beinart, have an answer. It’s simple: Ask people who disagree with you about their vision for the future.
“People yell at me about what I say sometimes about Palestine, and what’s going on in Israel. And they call me a bad Jew,” Stewart, who has been highly critical of Israel’s conduct in the war, told Beinart early in the conversation.
Beinart said he could relate. The historian and writer has made himself radioactive in certain sectors of the American Jewish community for rejecting orthodoxies about Israel. He has spoken out against what he calls Israel’s “mass slaughter and starvation” in Gaza and, in a 2020 New York Times essay, called for a one-state solution in which all people in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel have equal rights. The essay was titled, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.”
As he told me when I interviewed him about his book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, in February, “People may think I’m profoundly wrong.”
But Beinart had little advice for Stewart, who is clearly torn up about being an outcast among his fellow Jews.
“The biggest impact on people is not anything that I say,” Beinart answered Stewart. “It’s actually encountering what it’s like to live for Palestinians.”
That’s a good answer, but not a complete one. The better way to have a constructive dialogue with Jews — or anyone — about Israel is simply to ask one question: “What do you want?”
Many conversations about the Middle East turn into endless relitigations of which party is responsible for what problems. But the truth is that talking about the past is a non-starter. There are objective facts about 1948, 1967, the Oslo Accords, the 2005 Gaza withdrawal — but you and your differently minded friends will likely never agree on them.
That also goes for even more debatable facts, like who was there first; what God actually said to Abraham; and who invented hummus. These make great Reddit posts, but solve nothing.
No Palestinian is going to pack up and leave because you explained that the word “Palestine” is originally Greek, not Arabic. And no Israeli Jew is going to move out because a chart posted on Instagram showed that in 1948 the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine was 32%.
The only argument that matters is the one over the future. We can’t change the past. We can’t agree on it either. But we can agree that a different future is needed. So, when Stewart asked Beinart, “Have you ever been able to broach this with someone who believes as vehemently on the other side?” Beinart should have told him to ask his fellow Jews calling him a bad Jew what, exactly, they want to see happen in the Middle East.
In November 2023, when protests against Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks began in earnest, I offered the same advice: that the best way to confront anti-Israel protesters was to ask them what they want.
If they shout back, a free Palestine “by any means necessary!” I wrote, “ask them how, exactly, they see a way to exterminate Israel that leaves the rest of the Middle East intact? Ask them if the Palestinians in northern Gaza think the Hamas way is working.”
But the same question, I’ve found, works for friends, family and the readers who write me angry emails.
If they want Israel to annex Gaza and the West Bank and control the land and people “from the river to the sea,” without giving the Palestinians full rights, I ask how it’s possible to do that without becoming the apartheid state Israel’s opponents accuse it of already being?
If they want the Palestinians to be forced out, I ask: In what world could Israel make that happen and retain the support of allies like the United States?
If they say, like Beinart, that they want Israelis and Palestinians to live in one state with complete equality, I ask: How, given their violent histories, is that even possible?
These answers all lead to more complex questions. But what they don’t lead to is static arguments about the past, or angry accusations over what’s happening now — or whether Jon Stewart is a good or bad Jew.
Of course, what matters most is what Israelis and Palestinians want. What I want, above all, is that they come to see that achieving their visions without violence is the only way they can both have a future in the land.
