Peter Beinart, a prominent anti-Israel writer, being interviewed in January 2025. Photo: Screenshot

Peter Beinart, a professor, writer, and strident critic of Israel, has come under fire after refusing to classify Hamas as a terrorist organization, arguing that the designation carries racial undertones. 

While debating with fellow City University of New York (CUNY) professor Jeffrey Lax on Wednesday, Beinart was asked whether he believes that Hamas should be considered a “terrorist group.” Though Beinart said that he believes Hamas has committed “war crimes” and engages in “targeting civilians,” he claimed that the term is “unfairly” applied to Palestinians.

Drawing an equivalence between Hamas — an internationally recognized terrorist group — and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Beinart argued that Palestinian civilians have also been subjected to terrorism at the hands of the Jewish state. 

“I don’t like the word terrorism, because I believe it only gets applied to Palestinians,” Beinart said. 

“I believe that Hamas has committed war crimes. I think that Hamas’s history of targeting civilians is immoral and a violation of international law, and I oppose it with all of my being,” Beinart added. “The reason that I don’t like the word terrorism is that it only gets applied to what Palestinians do, and I have seen so many Palestinians who have experienced terror.”

Lax, visibly astounded, responded that he would not let Beinart “get away with” defending Hamas from accusations of terrorism, pointing out that the Palestinian terrorist group “burned babies in front of their families” and “raped women and cut off their limbs” during its invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. 

“You can’t call that terrorism?” Lax asked. 

A visibly flustered Beinart conceded that the “horrible” crimes perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 happened. However, the academic then drew a direct comparison between Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and the Jewish state’s defensive military response in Gaza.

“If I’m going to call [Oct. 7] terrorism, then I also have to call the killing of huge numbers of Palestinian civilians [terrorism],” Beinart said, seemingly downplaying Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.

Beinart argued that the term “terrorism” has “become racist,” lamenting that “it is never applied to what America does, never applied to Israel or our allies.” He added that labeling Hamas a terrorist organization is comparable to calling a black American a “thug.”

Beinart, an anti-Israel writer, has established himself as one of the most prominent anti-Zionist public intellectuals in recent years. As a contributing opinion columnist for the New York Times, he penned an op-ed for the newspaper disavowing his previous support for Israel, claiming that he “no longer believes in a Jewish state.” He has accused Israel of oppressing Palestinians and erecting an “apartheid” state built on the notion of ethnic supremacy.

Though Beinart has condemned the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, murder of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in southern Israel, he has also compared the massacre to the Haitian Slave Revolt and Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He argued that Israel’s supposed long-term “oppression” of Palestinians caused the Oct. 7 mass slaughters to occur. He has also claimed without evidence that Israel has carried out a “genocide” in Gaza as revenge for Oct. 7. 

In his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Beinart wrote that Jewish texts, history, and language have been “deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation [of the population of Gaza].”