Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (photo: Reuters/Mario Anzuoni)

It was the first night of Hanukkah and the “Great Debate” in Tel Aviv on Sunday between Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Peter Beinart posed a basic question: what will ensure Israel’s commonwealth today as it was ensured over 2,000 years ago when the Maccabees defeated the Greeks?

Up first, American Jewish author, political writer, and CUNY professor Peter Beinart said for Israel to survive, it must eschew the extreme religious nationalism which to some degree motivated the Maccabees.

“The Hanukkah story is a very inspiring idea in our time because it’s a Zionist story,” the author of “The Crisis of Zionism” told a packed hall at the David Intercontinental Hotel where the Globes Israel Business Conference hosted the event in conjunction with Tel Aviv International Salon and StandWithUs. “The Maccabees were fighting for national liberation, no question about that, and it was an inspiring fight, but they were not fighting for religious freedom for all people.”

The Maccabean achievement was not sustainable, Beinart said, because of internal moral corruption–a corruption he compares to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, “where the vast majority of people lack citizenship, live under military law and don’t have the right to vote in a government that controls their lives.”

Representing the more conservative side, bestselling author on Jewish ethics, columnist, and media personality Boteach shot back with fiery rabbinic polemics which contrasted with Beinart’s cool, academic demeanor–with both going for those tweetables.

“[To be a] Maccabee is a proud honor,” Boteach said, going on to hold up IDF soldiers, pro-Israel activists and a “fighter for the independence of his or her people” as examples of modern Maccabees.

Beinart made clear he is a staunch Zionist and defender of Israel, but of the “democratic Israel” within the “green line.” For this reason, Beinart supports a boycott of settlement goods, a boycott Boteach called “BDS Light” which has drawn fire from the pro-Israel community.

Decrying the absence of Palestinian human rights under Hamas and the kleptocratic Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, Boteach accused Beinart of being bothered more by his “Jewish conscience” than by the absence of Palestinian democracy.

“Israel doesn’t exist to make you feel better about yourself,” he told Beinart, in seeming dismay at his opponent’s disproportionate criticism of Israel.

Attacks were passionate yet intermingled with a friendly repartee which comes from Beinart and Boteach’s shared history; Boteach served as rabbi at Oxford University when Beinart studied there as a Rhodes scholar. They debated each other last year at Columbia University. If applause is a barometer for success, the 800-strong Tel Aviv audience was largely split.

The pair’s opposing views on Israel’s policies in the West Bank – or, in Boteach’s view, the Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria – infused their musing on Israel’s struggle with terrorism and strategies for fighting BDS.

“You have a younger generation of Palestinians that believe they have nothing to lose,” said Beinart of the Israel’s current terror wave. “If we want to defeat Hamas and we want to defeat those people who are committing these terrible, terrible acts around Israel, we have to show the Palestinians that there is a non-violent way of achieving the basic rights that we would want for ourselves.”

“There is no justification,” Boteach lashed back, calling Beinart guilty of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and of “blaming the victim.”

Echoing US secretary of state John Kerry’s warning earlier this week at the Saban Forum that a deadlock in the peace process could lead to a bi-national state, Beinart insisted the two-state policy is the only way out. “You need to maintain the possibility of a Palestinian state one day.” A viable path to Palestinian statehood, he added, is what poses the real threat to the anti-Israeli BDS movement.

Boteach countered that the motivations underlying the BDS movement are the same as those underlying Palestinian terrorism: anti-Semitism.

“They have no interest in Palestinian rights,” Boteach said of BDS. “They have an interest in the economic destruction of the State of Israel.”

While the debate may have been as fierce as that between the Maccabees and Hellenist Jews, in what may be a Hanukkah miracle the intellectual warriors found common ground on some issues: the Syrian plight, the need to wage war against ISIS and the need to engage college students with Israel.

“I think the greatest crisis we face on college campuses is Jewish illiteracy,” Beinart said, explaining that apathy towards Israel comes from apathy towards Judaism.

“I endorse what he said about strengthening Jewish identity,” Boteach said.

When Boteach challenged Beinart about why he won’t boycott Apple products for being made in China, which occupies Tibet, Beinart conceded that he is primarily concerned with the Jewish people. Does that make him an extreme nationalist…a Maccabee?

Beinart had the final word: “This state and this people matter more to me.”

From Jerusalem Post.