Peter Beinart: The Crisis of Zionism

Introduction (p. 3):

Roughly eighteen months ago, an Israeli friend sent me a video. It was of a Palestinian man named Fadel Jaber, who was being arrested for stealing water. His family had repeatedly asked Israeli authorities for access to the pipes that service a nearby Jewish settlement. But the Jabers have little influence over the Israeli authorities. Like all Palestinians in the West Bank, they are subjects. [ . . . ]

As soon as I began watching the video, I wished I had never turned it on. For most of my life, my reaction to accounts of Palestinian suffering has been rationalization, a search for reasons why the accounts are exaggerated or the suffering self-inflicted. In that respect, I suspect, I'm like many American Jews. But in recent years, for reasons I can't fully explain, I had been lowering my defenses, and Khaled's cries left me staring in mute horror at my computer screen.

Perhaps it is because my son is Khaled's age. He attends a Jewish school, has an Israeli flag on his wall, and can recount Bible stories testifying to our ancient ties to the land. When he was younger, we thought he would call me Abba, the Hebrew word for father. But he couldn't say Abba, so he calls me Baba, the same name Khaled calls his father.

(p. 4):

The shift from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power has been so profound, and in historical terms so rapid, that it has outpaced the way many Jews think about themselves. One hundred years ago, Jews in Palestine lived at the mercy of their Ottoman overlords; Jews in Europe endured crushing, often state-sponsored, anti-Semitism; Jews in the Muslim world were frequently consigned to second-class status; and Jews in the United States lived at the margins of American life. Even fifty years ago, none of Israel's Arab neighbors recognized its right to exist, and some of those neighbors seemed to enjoy military parity with, if not superiority over, the Jewish state. Most of the Jews still in Europe lived under a tyrannical, anti-Semitic Soviet regime, and even in the United States, some Ivy League universities still limited the number of Jewish students who could attend.

Today, we inhabit a different world. Israel has made peace with two of its Arab neighbors, and all the Arab countries have offered to make peace if Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, returns to the lines that prevailed before the 1967 Six-Day War, and reaches a "just" and "agreed upon" solution to the Palestinian refugee issue. Israel's defense budget easily exceeds those of its four immediate neighbors combined; it is the world's fifth-largest exporter of arms, and it is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons.

1. The Crisis in Israel: starts with a review of Theodor Herzl's novel Altneuland, which posited a future political struggle between two Zionist political parties: an inclusive, democratic one led by David Littwak, and an exclusive, nationalist one led by Rabbi Geyer -- fictional characters who set the tone for the chapter (pp. 18-19):

The boundary between David Littwak's Israel and Rabbi Geyer's winds vertically from just below Nazareth in the north to just above Beersheba in the south. To the west of that line, Israel is a flawed but genuine democracy. To the east, it is an ethnocracy. In the Israel created in 1948, inequities notwithstanding, citizenship is open to everyone. In the Israel created in 1967, by contrast, Jews are citizens of a state whose government they help elect; Palestinians are not. Jews carry identity cards with blue covers, which allow them to travel freely among the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the rest of Israel. West Bank Palestinians carry identity cards with orange or green covers, which deny them access to East Jerusalem, large chunks of the West Bank, and the rest of Israel unless they gain a special -- and hard-to-obtain -- permit. Jews in the West Bank who violate Israeli law go before civilian courts that afford them the full measure of due process. Palestinians who violate Israeli law go before military courts where, according to a 2007 study by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, defendants are often held for months or even years before trial and where fewer than 1 percent are found innocent. This boundary, between a nation where Jewish power is restrained by democratic ideals and a territory where Jewish power runs wild, is called the "green line." Its existence is what keeps the possibility of liberal Zionism alive.

But the green line is fading. In 1980, around twelve thousand Jews lived east of democracy, with another seventy thousand or so in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians can seek Israeli citizenship but are not born with it. Today, that number is three hundred thousand (with roughly two hundred thousand more in East Jeruslame), and the Jewish population of the West Bank is growing at three times the rate of the Israeli population inside the green line. In 1980, the Knesset did not contain a single Jewish settler. Today, Israel's foreign minister lives halfway across the West Bank. Over time, democratic and nondemocratic Israel have become Siamese twins. They share the same telephone system, bus system, road system, rail system, water system, and electricity grid. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Ariel, a settlement that stretches thirteen miles into the West Bank, "the heart of our country." Many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all.

(pp. 20-22):

In theory Israel could remain a democracy within its 1967 lines even as it forever denied Palestinians in the occupied territories the right to vote. But as Abraham Lincoln famously observed, countries that try to practice freedom and despotism side by side generally "become all one thing or all the other." Or as Israel's finance minister, Pinchas Sapir, warned soon after the Six-Day War, "If we keep holding the territories, in the end the territories will hold us." [ . . . ]

But at the same time, Rabbi Geyer's Zionism has infected democratic Israel, stunting the growth of liberal values and spawning authoritarian ones in their stead. Take the prohibition on the use of violence to resolve political disputes, one of liberal democracy's most basic prerequisites. In the West Bank, that prohibition barely applies. "Settler attacks on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories," reports the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, "have become routine." Some militant settlers, in fact, have formalized this violence in something called the "price tag" policy. For every Israeli government attempt to restrict settlement growth, they vandalize Palestinian homes, torch Palestinian fields, beat Palestinian men. For every act of law, a little pogrom. [ . . . ]

By contrast, according to a 2011 study by Yesh Din, fewer than 10 percent of reported settler attacks against Palestinians even result in indictments, let alone convictions. "For all practical purposes," explains the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, "the law is not the law, the settlers are the sovereign."

This culture of impunity would be dangerous enough were it confined to the West Bank. But people who grow habituated to lawlessness and violence do not shed those tendencies when they cross a line on a map. In 1996, a settler drove his car into one carrying Yossi Sarid, a cabinet minister from the dovish Meretz Party, trying to force it into a nearby ditch. The settler was later made a representative of the official settler body, the Yesha Council. In 2002, Hebrew University classics lecturer Amiel Vardi was shot while trying to help Palestinian farmers harvest their vineyards. The settler who shot him went free. In 2006, Baruch Marzel, a settler and the leader of the far-right Jewish National Front Party, declared at a campaign rally that the government should "carry out a targeted killing against [anti-occupation activist] Uri Avnery and his leftist collaborators." Marzel currently serves as an aide in the Knesset. In August 2008, a prominent rabbi in the settlement of Alon Shvut argued that members of the dovish group Peace Now might be eligible for the death penalty under Jewish law. The following month, Hebrew University professor Ze'ev Sternhell -- a Holocaust survivor, veteran of four of Israel's wars, internationally renowned scholar of fascism, recent winner of the prestigious Israel Prize, and impassioned critic of the occupation -- was wounded when a pipe bomb exploded at his home. Near the scene, police found flyers offering one million shekels to anyone who killed a member of Peace Now.

(p. 23):

Another is racism. The polling on Israeli Jewish attitudes toward Arabs is shocking. Seventy percent of Jewish Israelis, according to a poll by the Isreal Democracy Institute, oppose appointing Arab Israelis to cabinet posts. A survey by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation found that 49 percent of Jewish Israelis aged twenty-one to twenty-four would not befriend an Arab. (Among Arab Israelis of the same age, 19 percent said they would not befriend a Jew.) Fifty-six percent of Jewish Israeli high school students, according to a survey by Tel Aviv University's School of Education, do not believe that Arab citizens should be allowed to run for the Knesset. And a poll by the Truman Institute at the Hebrew University reported that 44 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that Jews should avoid renting apartments to Arabs. (All of these polls were conducted in 2010.)

(pp. 26-29):

Many Jews have responded by embracing Avigdor Lieberman, who has rocketed to political power by targeting what he calls the "enemy within." Lieberman, whose Yisrael Beiteinu Party has grown from four Knesset seats in 1999 to fifteen today, is the political incarnation of the anti-Arab racism that the occupation breeds. [ . . .  ] In 2006, Lieberman proposed revoking the citizenship of anyone who did not swear loyalty to the Israeli state, flag, and national anthem, and in 2009 he led an effort -- which the leaders of the Likud, Kadima, and Labor parties also backed -- to ban two anti-Zionist Arab parties from running for the Knesset. That same year, Haaretz reported that when Yisrael Beiteinu held its annual conference in the Galilee, a region where many Arab Israelis live, throngs of party activists chanted "Death to Arabs" at passing cars. In the 2009 elections, Lieberman's party came in third. In the mock voting held in Israeli high schools, it came in first.

Lieberman is currently Israel's foreign minister. He is joined in Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet by housing minister Ariel Attias from the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party, Shas, who in 2009 said he regards it "as a national duty to prevent the spread of a population that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel" -- in other words, Israel's Arab citizens. In the same speech, Attias volunteered that he does not "think that it is appropriate [for Arabs and Jews] to live together." Given those sentiments, it's no surprise that in 2011 the Knesset passed a law giving small Israeli communities greater latitude to bar Arab Israelis from moving in. Or that prominent lawmakers from Yisrael Beiteinu, Likud, and Kadima have all endorsed a law removing Arabic as one of Israel's official languages. "No other Knesset," notes Haaretz, "has submitted so many bills under the guide of 'preserving state security' that show open preference for Jews over Arabs in all walks of life." [ . . . ]

Many, it seems, are ready. A 2010 poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis want their government to encourage Israeli's Arab citizens to leave.

2. The Crisis in America (pp. 32-33):

At the core of the tragedy lies the refusal to accept that in both America and Israel, we live in an age not of Jewish weakness, but of Jewish power, and that without moral vigilance, Jews will abuse power just as hideously as anyone else. American Jewish organizations do not deny that Jews wield power; privately, they exult in it. Emotionally, power is what groups like AIPAC sell: the power to be a modern-day Esther, whispering in the ear of the king and saving your people from destruction. What they don't acknowledge is what happens at the end of the Purim story. By discussing power only as a means of survival, the American Jewish establishment implicitly denies that Jews can use power for anything but survival. They deny that Jews, like all human beings, can use power not merely to survive, but to destroy.

Beinart roots American Zionism as a species of American Liberalism, citing a line of prominent Zionists: Louis Brandeis, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. (pp. 35-36):

In 1935, Wise denounced Vladimir Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionism, with its hostility to territorial compromise, as "a species of fascism," a view that Silver echoed three years later. In 1964, a report by the American Jewish Committee declared, "in our support for Israel, our guiding principle has always been that such support be consistent . . . with the rights of the individual, be he Jew or non-Jew. As Americans, we have not hesitated to withhold this support or to disagree publicly when Israel's actions appeared to depart from the principle." In 1969, Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress and one of the founders of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, criticized the Israeli government for having "become committed to demands, both tactical and fundamental, that even the most moderate of Arabs can hardly be expected to accept."

(pp. 37-39):

When Israel won a shocking, lightning victory, American Zionism hit fever pitch. Between 1968 and 1971, the number of American Jews immigrating annually to Israel rose by a factor of eight. But if Israel's victory increased its power, it did not bring global acceptance. To the contrary, most of the Soviet block broke diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, and, partnering with leftist regimes in the third world, in 1975 pushed a resolution through the United Nations General Assembly equating Zionism with racism. A parallel trend occurred in the United States, where African-American and other leftist activists who had previously marched with Jews for civil rights and against the Vietnam War began denouncing Israel as an artifact of Western imperialism.

Watching these trends with dismay, American Jewish leaders hit upon an explanation: the world was turning against Jews because it no longer saw them as victims. In 1974, Benjamin Epstein, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, coauthored The New Anti-Semitism, a book whose argument proved so influential that in 1982 his successor, Nathan Perlmutter, echoed it in a book entitled The Real Anti-Semitism in America. Epstein's argument was that for a period after World War II, guilt over the Holocaust had kept anti-Semitism at bay. But with memories of the Holocaust fading, anti-Semitism had returned, largely in the form of hostility to Israel, because Israel represented Jewish power. "Jews are tolerable, acceptable in their particularity, only [his emphasis] as victims," wrote Epstein and his ADL colleague Arnold Forster, "and when their situation changes so that they are either no longer victims or appear not to be, the non-Jewish world finds this so hard to take that the effort is begun to render them victims anew." [ . . . ]

The argument caught on: in the 1970s, victimhood, especially as a strategy for defending Israel, supplanted liberalism as the defining ideology of organized American Jewish life. [ . . . ]

But in the 1970s, American Jewish organizations began hoarding the Holocaust, retelling it as a story of the world's eternal hatred of Jews, and linking it to criticism of Israel. In 1973, the ADL embarked on a "new international mission" to combat "Arab anti-Israel propaganda" and four years later created a Center for Holocaust Studies. In 1980, the ADL's Oscar Cohen advised the National Conference of Christians and Jews to link its Holocaust programming "to Israel and the dangers which confront" it. The following year, as part of its bid to prevent the Reagan administration from selling AWACS surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia, AIPAC sent a copy of the novel Holocaust to every member of Congress.

Beinart points out that the lesson of Jewish victimhood was as much directed at young Jews as at gentiles, particularly in view of "the single most pressing problem confronting the organized Jewish community": intermarriage.

(p. 42):

In the 1980s, the ideological gulf widened between American Jews and the organizations that claimed to represent them. When Jabotinsky's heir, Likud leader Menachem Begin, became Israel's prime minister in 1977, and Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, even the attenuated liberalism of groups like the American Jewish Committee and the ADL became a liability. How could organizations rooted in American liberalism and Labor Zionism effectively influence the Revisionists governing Jerusalem and the Christian conservatives governing Washington? Suddenly AIPAC, whose indifference to liberal values in the United States had once contributed to its marginality, took center stage. AIPAC's executive director, Tom Dine, was a former aide to Senator Ted Kennedy. But after the elections of Begin and Reagan, he recruited a cluster of conservative donors and used AIPAC's ties to the American and Israeli right to outpace the older organizations in influence. He succeeded all too well. By 1993, those conservative donors had ousted him, and in 1996 they installed an official from the Republican Jewish Coalition in AIPAC's top job. Similarly, in 1986, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group deputized since the 1950s with lobbying the executive branch on Israel policy, hired Malcolm Hoenlein, an activist with ties to the settler movement, as its top staffer. America's Jewish communal leaders, declared the Jewish journalist J.J. Goldberg, were becoming "ever more incomprehensible to the majority of their fellow Jews."

3. Should American Jews Criticize Israel? Beinart cites two reasons "American Jewish leaders say that American Jews should not publicly criticize Israeli policy": because they don't live there, and because Israel is a democracy, a process outsiders should respect. (Abraham Foxman: "Israeli democracy should decide; American Jews should support.") (p. 51):

But beyond the question of consistency, there is something perverse about citing Israeli democracy to condone an occupation that imperils Israeli democracy. Within the green line, one might conceivably argue that Israeli policies are beyond reproach because they enjoy popular consent. Israeli policy in the occupied territories, by contrast, enjoys no such thing. To the contrary, the occupation relies on Palestinian disenfranchisement. Were Israel to allow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to vote in its elections, Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza would shift radically. Even if Israel merely restricted voting to those Jews whose non-Jewish neighbors can also vote -- that is, Jews within the green line -- Israeli policy would substantially change. Without settler votes, for instance, Benjamin Netanyahu would have lost to Shimon Peres in 1996 and would have found it harder to create a right-wing coalition government in 2009.

About the tendency of Jewish leaders (e.g., Foxman) to tar anyone who criticizes Israel with the charge of anti-semitism -- examples in the book include Mary Robinson, Bill Moyers, Andrew Sullivan, and Jimmy Carter (p. 58):

All too often, Jews assume that gentiles, because they are powerful, can take it, and that Jews, because of our history of persecution, can play fast and loose in the Israeli government's defense. This moral promiscuity constitutes a terrible abuse of the authority that Jewish leaders enjoy as a result of the history of Jewish suffering. It constitutes a kind of desecration, analogous to taking a sacred object and putting it to profane use. But most of all, it represents an unwillingness to accept that the world has changed, that although Israel still faces threats and anti-Semitism still exists, Jews today wield power, both in Israel and the United States. With power comes the temptation to abuse it, and using the charge of anti-Semitism to shield Israel from criticism is the best way to ensure that Israel does exactly that.

4. Is the Occupation Israel's Fault? (p. 62):

For the forseeable future, Israel's greatest external threats will come not from conventional armies but from rockets and terrorists. But occupying the West Bank is a poor way to guard against them. While a Palestinian state in the West Bank could put all of Israel within range of rocket fire, the harsh truth is that all of Israel is already within range. Between them, Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah have missiles that can hit every inch of Israel. That doesn't mean that Israel need not worry about potential rocket fire from the West Bank. It does mean, however, that the best way to combat that threat is through sophisticated missile defense systems like the recently installed Iron Dome; through a credible deterrent so that Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, and Iran know they will pay a severe price for bloodying the Jewish state; and ultimately, through peace deals like the ones Israel reached with Egypt and Jordan. Occupying the West Bank, by contrast, offers less protection at much higher cost.

Some review of the Oslo Accords and the Camp David fiasco (pp. 68-69):

But if the Camp David talks raise questions about the Palestinian willingness to abandon a large-scale right of return, they also eviscerate the American Jewish establishment's oft-repeated claim that, in the words of the 2009 ADL ad, "The Problem Isn't Settlements." At Camp David, one of the biggest problems was, indeed, settlements. With Yitzhak Rabin's assassination still fresh in his mind, Barak was extremely concerned about a confrontation with the settlers, and insisted that he needed to annex the land on which 80 percent of them lived in order to avoid grave domestic strife. To achieve that, he proposed an annexation that would have created serious contiguity problems for the nascent Palestinian state. Arafat reportedly countered with a land swap that would have allowed Israel to incorporate 35 percent of the settlers -- not in broad settlement "blocs," but in thin "ribbons" that would have less significantly impeded Palestinian travel but would have proved extremely difficult for Israel to defend. The same issue bedeviled talks eight years later between Ehud Olmert and Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Olmert proposed a roughly 6 percent land swap; Abbas offered roughly 2 percent and "kept coming back," in Olmert's words, to the need to dismantle Ariel.

Settlements are not the only important barrier to a two-state solution. But the historical record clearly shows that, contrary to the American Jewish establishment's twin insistences that Israel tried to give back virtually the entire West Bank, and that settlements are not a major obstacle to peace, it was precisely because Israel insisted on retaining most of the settlers that it could not offer the Palestinians virtually the entire West Bank. In the words of the former Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath, "Probably the settlement issue was the single most important destroyer of the Oslo agreement."

(pp. 71-72):

The claim that Barak had tried to give away virtually the entire West Bank but Arafat would not take it did not emerge from nowhere. Under a withering right-wing assault, and desperate for political cover as elections approached, Barak himself boasted of having exposed Arafat's rejectionism. Clinton, eager to help Barak politically, echoed the refrain. But over the last decade, as the American Jewish establishment has turned this argument into a kind of catechism, top aides to Clinton and Barak have repudiated it. Aaron David Miller, Clinton's deputy special Middle East coordinator, has said that both Barak and Arafat "in his own way bears responsibility for what happened at Camp David." Martin Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel, argues, "It was not reasonable to expect that Arafat, or any Arab leader for that matter, would agree to an end-of-conflict agreement that left sovereignty over the Haram-al-Sharif in Israeli hands forever." Israeli officials have been even more vehement. "I was part of the 'no-partner' campaign, and it's one of the things I regret most," notes former Barak aide Tal Zilberstein. "Ten years later, there are still people who say, 'We gave them everything at Camp David and got nothing.' That is a flagrant lie." Adds Eldad Yaniv, Barak's former campaign adviser, "I was one of the people behind this false and miserable spin. It may have been justified to a certain extent to stir the Palestinians to revive the negotiations, but it's false."

(pp. 72-73):

If American Jewish groups have taken the messy reality of the Oslo process and scrubbed it clean of Israeli culpability, they have done the same with Ariel Sharon's 2005 dismantling of settlements in Gaza, another episode that supposedly shows that Israeli leaders yearned to create a viable Palestinian state. The problem with this argument is that Sharon and his top advisers said exactly the opposite: that the Gaza evacuation was meant not to create a Palestinian state, but to forestall one. By 2004, the second intifada had fizzled, Arafat was dead, and America's sequel to Oslo, the Road Map, was going nowhere. Into the breach came two initiatives. The first was the offer, drafted by Saudi Arabia and endorsed by the entire Arab League, to recognize Israel if it returned to the 1967 lines and negotiated a "just" and "agreed upon" solution for the Palestinian refugees. The second was the Geneva Accord, a model peace agreement signed by former Israeli and Palestinian negotiators that would have required Israel to dismantle major settlements like Ariel. These moves terrified Sharon, a lifelong opponent of a Palestinian state who feared international pressure to agree to the kind of deal that Clinton had proposed in December 2000. Warning that "only an Israeli initiative will keep us from being dragged into dangerous initiatives like the Geneva and Saudi initiatives," Sharon proposed unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, a place with far less biblical significance than the West Bank, a tiny fraction of the settlers, and which Israeli strategists had long considered a burden. His influential chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, made Sharon's intentions clear. "The significance of the disengagement plan," he declared in October 2004, "is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called a Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda."

After Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the Palestinians held elections which were won by Hamas (pp. 75-76):

When American Jewish leaders say that the Gaza withdrawal shows that Israel once again sought peace and the Palestinians once again chose war -- and thus, that the occupation is not Israel's fault -- this is the choice they ignore. Israel's choice, rather than supporting a unity government and negotiating a cease-fire, was to boycott Hamas until the group recognized Israel, unilaterally renounced violence, and abided by past peace agreements. (The third criterion was particularly bizarre since during the Oslo peace process, as Shlomo Ben-Ami notes, "every new Israeli government asked for a revision of the agreements signed by the previous government.") In fact, Israel and the United States not only opposed a Palestinian unity government; they encouraged Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan to violently overturn the election results, a move that backfired when Hamas won the battle of arms and took control in its stronghold of Gaza. When that failed, Israel -- with the support of the United States, and to some extent Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, which feared Hamas's ties to its own Islamist opposition -- imposed a blockade designed not only to prevent Hamas from importing weapons, but to punish Gazans for electing it. Since the vast majority of Gaza's exports and imports passed through Israel, the blockade shattered its economy. By 2008, 90 percent of Gaza's industrial companies had closed. Lacking fuel, garbage trucks stopped running in a majority of Gazan towns. With Gaza's border with Israel largely sealed except for humanitarian goods, Hamas built tunnels underneath Gaza's border with Egypt. And while the tunnels did little to relieve the misery of average Gazans, they left Hamas in almost total control of the Strip's economy and armed with even more sophisticated weapons than they had possessed before the blockade. Thus, a policy meant to weaken Hamas by immiserating the people of Gaza achieved the latter goal but not the former.

(p. 77):

In December 2008, after the cease-fire collapsed, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip. The invasion took thirteen Israeli and fourteen hundred Palestinian lives. Despite Israel's genuine efforts to limit civilian damage, the war partially or completely destroyed 14 percent of Gaza's buildings, including sixteen hospitals, thirty-eight health clinics, and 280 schools, some of which were in session when the bombs fell.

5. The Jewish President: intro on rabbis Arnold Jacob Wolf and Abraham Joshua Heschel (p. 82):

What does all this have to do with Barack Obama? Actually, quite a lot. Far more than any previous president, Obama spent his adulthood in the company of Jews. His most important professional mentors were Jews; most of his big donors were Jews; many of his neighbors were Jews; his chief political consultant was a Jew. As Wolf himself would later say, Obama was "embedded in the Jewish world."

Many more Jewish names follow, most famously Abner Mikva and David Axelrod; also Dennis Ross.

6. The Monist Prime Minister (pp. 100-104):

Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't trust Barack Obama, and probably never will. The reason is simple: Obama reminds Netanyahu of what Netanyahu doesn't like about Jews.

Understanding what Netanyahu doesn't like about Jews requires understanding what Vladimir Jabotinsky didn't like about Jews. For if Obama's Jewish lineage runs through Arnold Jacob Wolf to Abraham Joshua Heschel, Netanyahu's runs through his father, Benzion, to Jabotinsky, the spellbinding, romantic, brutal founder of Revisionist Zionism.

What Jabotinsky didn't like about Jews was their belief that they carried a moral message to the world. [ . . . ] When the Jews had land, an army, and a state, the Revisionists argued, nationalism held this emasculating moralism in check. But when the Jews were dispersed, they turned weakness into a virtue by valorizing religious ethics and religious ritual at the expense of military power. They adopted, as the writer Dov Chomsky explained in Betar's monthly journal, Madrich, "the dangerous and weakening belief that Israel is different from all other nations . . . that the Jews were scattered all over the world in order to advance humanity and spread the humanistic teachings of the prophets."

Zionism should have solved this, since it focused on reclaiming land, sovereignty, and -- for the Revisionists especially -- military power. [ . . . ]

In keeping with his pro-imperial worldview, Jabotinsky expressed openly racist views of Arabs and Muslims. Islamic civilization, he declared, represents the "complete antithesis to European civilization, which distinguishes itself by intellectual curiosity, free investigation, dynamism and a minimum of interference of religion in everyday life." [ . . . ]

For the most part, however, [Jabotinsky] envisioned Arabs living in a Jewish state with individual rights and cultural autonomy. But that could only happen once Palestine's Arabs abandoned their own nationalist dreams, and that could only happen, in Jabotinsky's view, once they had been militarily and psychologically crushed. This required building up Jewish military might and using it without scruple -- no matter what the moralists said -- for as long as it took to make the enemy submit.

The connection was remarkably direct: in 1939, Jabotinsky summoned Benzion Netanyahu to work as his private secretary. And on to the son (pp. 110-111):

For [Benjamin] Netanyahu, however, the Jewish condition has not fundamentally changed. Since Jews still live on the knife edge of extinction, any ethical standard outside of Zionism itself still endangers Jewish survival. It is always 1938. After Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, Netanyahu called Peres "worse than [Neville] Chamberlain," the British prime minister who appeased a Hitler. In A Durable Peace, Netanyahu repeatedly compares the West Bank to the Sudetenland, which the Nazis cleaved from Czechoslovakia en route to overrunning the entire country. Dismantling Jewish settlements, he argues, would mean a "judenrein" West Bank and a "ghetto-state" within Israel's 1967 borders.

If it is 1938, then Jews have no moral responsibility except to survive. In the Warsaw Ghetto, you don't agonize about how you treat the Nazis. And if the Palestinians are Nazis, compromise is fruitless because the enemy understands only force. By repeatedly comparing Palestinians to Nazis, Netanyahu dehumanizes them, turning them into little more than irrational, genocidal Jew-haters. But he also dehumanizes them in a more old-fashioned way, the way his father and Jabotinsky did, by calling them savages. One of the remarkable features of A Durable Peace is Netanyahu's tendency to approvingly quote imperialists expressing racist views of Arabs. He quotes Winston Churchill as saying, "Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps toward the irrigation and electrification of Palestine." He cites Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Britain's chief political officer in Palestine after World War I, as opining, "The Arab is a poor fighter, though an adept at looting, sabotage and murder." (Like Churchill, Meinertzhagen is one of Netanyahu's favorite historical figures. In A Durable Peace, he praises Meinertzhagen's "remarkable character.")

(pp. 115-116):

Netanyahu's familiarity with American culture is legendary: he attended high school in the United States, attended college in the United States, attended graduate school in the United States, was first married in the United States, got his first full-time job in the United States, and held American citizenship until he was in his thirties. He also began his government career in the United States, when, in 1982, he became a political attaché in the Israeli embassy in Washington. The 1980s were a hinge decade in organized American Jewish life. With Republicans in the White House and Likud prime ministers in Israel, the venerable, civil-rights-minded Jewish institutions -- the American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, and Anti-Defamation League -- were losing power to AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which lacked any connection to domestic liberalism. [ . . . ] And as a Revisionist with no ties to Zionism's socialist heritage, he was perfectly placed to build ties to the conservative Jews who were gaining influence in an American Jewish establishment newly freed from its own left-liberal roots. In Washington and then in New York, where he served as Israel's ambassador to the UN, Netanyahu grew close to Malcolm Hoenlein, who in 1986 became the top staffer at the Presidents' Conference. He also developed friendships with the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder and the real estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman , both of whom went on to chair the conference; with the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, one of the largest donors to AIPAC and the more right-leaning Zionist Organization of America; and with Irving Moscowitz, a major funder of settler and pro-settler groups in Israel and the United States.

(p. 118):

AIPAC's most powerful board members, according to one former stafer, spent the Rabin years "waiting for Bibi to ascend." And when Netanyahu did win the prime ministership in 1996, he and his allies in the American Jewish establishment switched from undermining Rabin's peace efforts to undermining Clinton's.

Upon becoming prime minister, Netanyahu -- under American pressure -- pledged to continue the Oslo process. But as he later told settlers, his real strategy was "to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders." In a speech to Likud's central committee a few months after taking office, Netanyahu flatly declared, "There will never be a Palestinian state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan."

To make good on that pledge, Netanyahu created a government dominated by parties hostile to the peace process, and repeatedly used their hostility as an excuse for avoiding the steps that Oslo required.

(pp. 120-121):

In fact, Netanyahu had a clear vision of where he hoped Oslo would lead. Over the course of the 1990s, he detailed this vision in books and op-eds; he drew maps on napkins; he even presented a plan to his cabinet. Under Netanyahu's plan, the Palestinians would live in four disconnected cantons: one encompassing Jenin, Nablus, and Ramallah in the north; a second encompassing Bethlehem and Hebron in the south; a third encompassing Jericho in the east; and a fourth encompassing Qalquilya in the west. Together, these cantons would comprise roughly 40 percent of the West Bank. Israel would control the other 60 percent. This would include most Jewish settlements, and all "the open (and largely unpopulated) land" in the West Bank. Since the West Bank's rural land would be annexed to Israel, it could not be used to resettle Palestinian refugees, who under Netanyahu's plan would remain permanently in those Arab countries to which they fled in 1948. These four Palestinian cantons would not constitute a state -- indeed, even they would be bisected by Israeli roads -- but within them, Palestinians would enjoy autonomy over education, health care, and the like.

Netanyahu's vision left American negotiators dumbfounded. "No Palestinian alive will accept that," exclaimed Dennis Ross. But Netanyahu was not seeking Palestinian acceptance; he was seeking Palestinian submission. [ . . . ] "I am often asked: Would the Palestinian Arabs accept autonomy?" he wrote in 1994. "My answer is that they would accept it if they knew Israel wouldn't given them an independent state." In other words, once Israel crushes their spirit, the Palestinians will take whatever they get.

(pp. 121-122):

Not surprisingly, given Netanyahu's hostility to a Palestinian state, many in the Clinton administration felt hostile toward him. According to Aaron David Miller, the Clinton administration's Middle East team "saw Bibi as a kind of speed bump that would have to be negotiated along the way until a new Israeli prime minister came along who was more serious about peace." In the words of Miller's boss, Dennis Ross, "neither President Clinton nor Secretary Albright believed that Bibi had any real interest in pursuing peace."

But every time the Clinton administration tried to drag Netanyahu in the direction of a viable Palestinian state, Netanyahu rallied American Jewish groups and conservative Republicans to his defense. In January 1998, with the White House pushing him for a larger territorial withdrawal, Netanyahu flew to Washington just days after the news broke about Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and addressed a rally organized by Clinton foe Jerry Falwell and the Adelson-backed Zionist Organization of America. After Netanyahu's speech, the crowd chanted, "Not one inch." Falwell later said the event "was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clinton." [ . . . ] Later, Netanyahu would tell settlers that "I wasn't afraid to confront Clinton" because "America is something that can be easily swayed."

7. The Clash: Netanyahu openly favored Republican John McCain for president in 2008, but Obama got 78 percent of the Jewish vote; before Obama could take office Israel (actually, the Kadima government that soon lost to Netanyahu) launched Operation Cast Lead, their invasion of Gaza; that froze Obama, as did Israel's elections and the formation of Netanyahu's government; when Obama's point man, George Mitchell, pressed Israel for a settlement freeze, Netanyahu scoffed (p. 138):

If the settlement freeze had been designed to strengthen Abbas and Fayyad, the Obama administration's retreat from it had the reverse effect. The accounts of meetings between American and Palestinian officials during Obama's settlement climbdown are excruciating. Urged on September 16 by Mitchell's deputy, David Hale, to accept a temporary freeze riddled with exceptions, Erekat predicted, "This will mean more settlement construction in 2009 than in 2008."

(pp. 141-144):

The divergent responses reflected, in part, the ongoing battle between Ross and Mitchell. One administration official complained to Politico that Ross was advocating "pre-emptive capitulation to what he described as Bibi's coalition's red lines." Ross, in turn, waged what one close observer called "a ruthless campaign against George Mitchell," repeatedly suggesting that he was spending too much time at home in New York and not enough in Washington and the Middle East. [ . . . ]

Nevertheless, the White House launched an apology tour. Rahm Emmanuel told a group of rabbis that the White House had "screwed up the messaging" on Israel. Daniel Shapiro told a senior Jewish organizational official that the administration should not have allowed a settlement freeze to become a precondition for talks. Dennis Ross said he hoped American Jewish leaders "had seen the manifestations of the change" in the administration's tone. [ . . . ]

So once again, the White House was rebuffed, and once again it did not seriously consider applying pressure. To the contrary, Ross -- who was now firmly in control of Israel policy -- tried to bribe the Israelis. In exchange for a three-month extension of the partial settlement freeze, the Obama administration reportedly offered to sell Israel twenty F-35 jets, to veto a declaration of Palestinian statehood at the UN, to offer long-term security guarantees in the event of a peace deal, and to never request another extension again. [ . . . ] For Barack Obama, the retreat from the liberal Zionism he had learned in Chicago had only just begun.

8. The Humbling: Obama gives a speech, emphasizing the 1967 borders as the basis for negotiations (pp. 152-155):

But publicly, the White House had no choice but to endure the abuse. In their fear that the Israel-Palestine section of Obama's speech would leak, White House staffers had given the president's supporters no instructions on how to defend it. One White House ally received calls from members of Congress who wanted to defend the president, but did not know what to say. Meanwhile, Netanyahu's denunciation of a return to the 1967 lines -- which brazenly ignored Obama's language about mutually agreed upon land swaps -- was recycled endlessly. Former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block declared Obama's speech "an ambush" that would "further undermine the trust of Israelis, not to mention their elected officials, that this president can be trusted with their security." Thirty senators consponsored legislation opposing any return to the 1967 lines. One administration official received a call from his sister, a Hebrew school teacher, demanding to know why he was helping push Israel back to the indefensible 1967 lines. A White House staffer received gloating e-mails from American Jewish leaders asking him if he regretted having allowed discussion of the 1967 lines into the president's speech. [ . . . ]

The May 2011 clash over the 1967 lines proved to be the last time President Obama publicly articulated the liberal Zionism that he had learned in Chicago. After that, he effectively adopted Benjamin Netanyahu's monist Zionism as his own.

After the president's May 19 speech, articles began to appear suggesting that Jewish donors were refusing to support his reelection bid. One of Obama's largest fund-raisers told New York magazine, "There's no question. We have a big-time Jewish problem." According to one Jewish leader, "about $10 million evaporated in that speech." Among actual Jewish voters, there was still no evidence that Obama's Israel policy was undermining his support. Obama's popularity among Jews had certainly declined since the early days of his presidency, as it had among the public at large. But a Gallup poll in September 2011 found that the gap between Jews and other Americans had not narrowed at all. [ . . . ]

For American Jews, the only effective validators of Obama's Israel policy were Israelis themselves. Soon, the Obama campaign began trumpeting supportive statements by Israeli officials. On August 5, David Axelrod sent out a mass e-mail quoting defense minister Ehud Barak as saying, "I can hardly remember . . . a better period of [American] support" for Israel. In September, the campaign posted on its website a clip of Danny Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister from Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party, declaring, "We've never had a better friend than President Obama." The White House also distributed a transcript of Netanyahu praising Obama for his help in rescuing Israeli officials during an attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo.

Obama gave another speech on September 21 at the UN, where he backed down even further (p. 158):

Hours before Obama's speech, three White House aides had held a conference call to drum up support among American Jewish leaders. It worked. AIPAC, which had expressed "concern" about aspects of Obama's May 19 speech, now gushed with praise. So did the Israeli government. Avigdor Lieberman declared that he would "sign the speech with both hands." Netanyahu remarked, "There's been a great closing of the ranks between Israel and the United States in the last few months." Meanwhile, anti-Obama protest broke out in the West Bank. After traveling to Ramallah, one Israeli journalist observed that the Palestinians now hated Obama more than they had hated George W. Bush. PLO general secretary Yasser Abed Rabbo declared that the United States could no longer serve as the primary mediator between the two sides.

9. The Future (pp. 162-167):

When it comes to Israel, young American Jews can be divided into three groups. The first are the Orthodox, a population that is fast remaking American Jewish life. [ . . . ] Roughly three-quarters of American Orthodox Jews are "Modern Orthodox," which means they seek to reconcile strict religious observance with active participation in the larger world. Modern Orthodox Jews have long been more intensely committed to Israel than have other American Jews, largely because they are more intensely committed to Jewish enterprises in general. But the gap is widening. According to the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, Orthodox Jews over the age of sixty were just over twice as likely as their Reform counterparts to feel "extremely" or "very" attached to Israel. Among Jews under forty, the ratio was four to one.

This is partly the result of education. The days when Orthodox Jewish children -- like the future U.S. senator Joseph Lieberman -- attended public school are long gone. Since roughly the 1970s, the bulk of American Orthodox Jews have sent their children to Orthodox Jewish schools where Israel is a constant presence. In these schools, students learn Hebrew, often from Israeli teachers, and they learn Zionist history, often in courses aimed more at instilling devotion than critical thought. [ . . . ] Even more important, most Modern Orthodox high school graduates now spend a year or two studying in an Israeli yeshiva (seminary) before college. Most deepen their attachment to the country; some never come back. The Orthodox share of Americans who immigrate to Israel has risen from about 40 percent in the early 1970s to roughly 80 percent today. [ . . . ]

The Orthodox Union is arguably the preeminent Modern Orthodox organization in the United States. In June 2010, its representative in Israel posted an essay on its website entitled "Reflections on a True Gadol [great person]," which lovingly eulogized the late Israeli chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu. Left unmentioned was Eliyahu's notorious ruling that since God gave Jews the entire land of Israel, settlers have the right to steal Palestinian crops. Eliyahu, a close associate of Meir Kahane, also declared, "A thousand Arabs are not worth one yeshiva student." When a tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004, he said God was punishing Asian governments for supporting Ariel Sharon's proposed evacuation of settlements in Gaza. [ . . . ]

In the "Orthodox global village" created by modern communications and transportation, these toxic currents are imported to the United States and then reexported back to Israel. Thus, in 1994, after Brooklyn-born settler Baruch Goldstein -- a follower of Brooklyn-born Meir Kahane -- massacred twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in Hebron, he became a hero among a radical fringe of Israeli settlers. A year later, after extremist Modern Orthodox rabbis in Israel and the United States speculated that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin might be a traitor to the Jewish people punishable by death under Jewish law for his willingness to cede parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians, a National Religious Israeli named Yigal Amir took Rabin's life. The feedback loop continues to this day. Herschel Schachter is among the most powerful rabbis at Yeshiva University, the flagship educational institution of American Modern Orthodoxy. In 2008, he was caught on video advising yeshiva students in Jerusalem, "If the army is going to give away Yerushalayim [Jerusalem], then I would tell everyone to resign from the army -- I'd tell them to shoot the rosh hamemshala [prime minister]."

(pp. 168-169):

If the illiberal Zionism of young Orthodox Jews seems increasingly likely to define organized American Jewry in the coming years, it is partly because so many other young American Jews feel so little Zionist attachment at all. The distancing of young, non-Orthodox American Jews from Israel has troubled Jewish sociologists and philanthropists since at least the 1980s. But it conflates two entirely different phenomena. One large chunk of non-Orthodox Jews cares less and less about Israel because they care less and less about Judaism. A second, smaller, but more influential cadre cares deeply about Judaism but cannot reconcile its version of Judaism with Israel's policies. Thus, these young Jews are building a vibrant American Judaism that averts its gaze from the Jewish state. Both groups, in different ways, are contributing to liberal Zionism's demise in the United States.

Actually, Beinart misses a group, which are people who identify as Jews but not with Israel, who trace their commitment to social justice less to Jewish religion than to Jewish social and political traditions, which may include Marxism or other socialist views.

Conclusion (p. 180):

The basic bargain behind a two-state solution has long been clear: the Palestinians abandon their claim to the 78 percent of mandatory Palestine inside the green line in return for a state on the 22 percent that constitutes this West Bank and Gaza Strip, with minor adjustments. It is a bargain that would have made most of Israel's founders -- who in 1947 accepted a partition plan that gave Israel a mere 55 percent of the land -- cry with joy. Yet the organized American Jewish community pretends that Israel can continually transgress that bargain without bringing the entire two-state paradigm crashing down and, with it, Israel's existence as a democratic Jewish state.

More kvetching about intermarriage (pp. 183-184):

Defending Israeli democracy, therefore, requires ensuring that the American Jews most committed to democratic values remain Jews and pass Judaism on to their children. Liberal American Jews must feel a special commitment to Israel's ethical character because they feel a special commitment to being Jewish. They must see their own honor as bound up with the honor of the Jewish state.

Among the world's Diaspora communities, American Jews have done a singularly bad job of inculcating Jewish commitment in our children. [ . . . ] Perhaps no community in Jewish history has educated itself so well about the secular world and so poorly about its own tradition. [ . . . ]

The best antidote to assimilation, by far, is education. And the best way to educate young Jews about Judaism is through full-time Jewish schools. For decades, American Jewry's dominant mode of religious instruction has been supplementary schools, which meet in the afternoons or on Sundays. But it is difficult to gain much knowledge of Judaism -- and much fluency in Hebrew -- in a couple of hours a week. An analysis of the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey found that among American Jews who had attended Sunday school for six year or less, only 42 percent married other Jews. Among those who had attended Sunday school for more than six year, the figure was 60 percent. By contrast, of those American Jews who had attended full-time Jewish school for six years or less, 82 percent married other Jews.

Beinart endorses BDS, then pulls his punch, pivoting on his preferred terminology: referring to Israel within the green line as "democratic Israel," a contrast with "nondemocratic Israel" -- i.e., the occupied territories, including the settlements (p. 193):

But a settlement boycott, in and of itself, is not enough. It must be twinned with an equally vigorous embrace of the people and products of democratic Israel. We should spend the money we are not spending on settler goods on those from within the green line. We should oppose efforts to divers from all Israeli companies with the same intensity with which we support efforts to divest from companies located in the West Bank. When the partisans of nondemocratic Israel visit Jewish America, they should be met with protests. When we receive visits from Israelis struggling for democracy, we should treat them as heroes. Call this simultaneous effort at delegitimizing the occupation and legitimizing Israel, "Zionist BDS."

This strikes me as analogous to trying to put pressure on China over Tibet by boycotting all goods made by Chinese in Tibet but not bothering with Chinese goods produced in China proper: not only is the effect drastically diluted, you're not even making the point that China is responsible for its Tibet policy. The occupation is Israeli policy, so why not oppose it by targeting the people responsible for it: Israel; indeed, "democratic Israel," since the occupation has repeatedly been endorsed in Israeli elections?

(p. 196):

In The Kuzari, written around 1140, the medieval Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi imagined a dialogue between a rabbi and a pagan king. At one point, the rabbi extols the morality of the Jews. Unlike the Christian world -- which according to Jewish tradition is called Edom (red) because it is soaked with blood -- the Jews, he declares, have held themselves to a higher standard.

But the king is unconvinced. Jewish morality, he insists, is merely the byproduct of Jewish weakness. "If you had the power," he retorts, "you would slay."

In Israel, we have our answer to the king. We can finally know whether the ethical traditions that so often made diaspora Jews the conscience of their nations can survive now that Jews have a nation of their own. The standard is not perfection; it is equal citizenship, the same standard laid out by Theodor Herzl and by the Israelis who announced their nation's birth to the world. Since 1967, Israel has taken a grave turn away from that principle, and in the next generation, possibly in the next decade, we will learn if it can find its way back. The struggle to help the Jewish state return to its founding ideals is not a struggle for Israelis alone. It is a struggle that calls all Jews because Israel is the great test of Judaism in our time. If Israeli democracy falls, it will fall for all of us. No matter where we live, we will spend our lives sifting through the political, ethical, and theological rubble.