Peter Beinart's New York Review of Books piece slams the American Zionism's uncritical support of progression of increasingly hard line Israeli governments.
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
...For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.
Beinart writes that recent Israeli governments have veered to the far right mirroring disturbing changes in the attitudes of Israelis, largely driven by demographic changes.
Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset
The essay explores Netanyahu's extremest views laid out in his 1993 book A Place among the Nations where Bibi emphatically rejected a Palestinian State and even rejected the existence of a Palestinian People (things Bibi has unconvincingly recanted). Netanyahu also repeatedly equated Palestinian national aspirations with Nazism.
An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a "ghetto-state" with "Auschwitz borders." And the effort "to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel" resembles Hitler’s bid to wrench the German-speaking "Sudeten district" from Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Beinart criticism of the American Zionist establishment support for increasingly hard line Israeli policies is scathing.
But in practice, by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire.
He points to profound differences between the younger generation of American secular Jews in their attitudes towards Israel, from the group think of their parents.
Because they have inherited their parents’ liberalism, they cannot embrace their uncritical Zionism. Because their liberalism is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment is fake.
Polls show younger secular American Jews are losing their sense of attachment to Israel, and on a deeper level how they view themselves in relation to the larger American society, changing how they view Israel in the world, from how their parents did.
...since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, "Victimhood sets you free."
This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s.
A June 9th article in the Christian Science Monitor illustrates the hardening of Israeli attitudes toward the Palestinians accompanied by the almost total dismissal of international criticism of Israeli military violence by Israelis across the political spectrum as being overly critical of Israel. Seen among Israelis as just another expression of what Israelis see as a general worldwide prejudice against Jews.
Why Israel ignores global criticism of Gaza flotilla raid
Israel's growing isolation – including the global outcry over the May 31 Gaza flotilla raid – strengthens a pessimistic world view, say analysts. Israelis see international criticism as hyperbole linked to centuries of anti-Jewish persecution – and something that can be ignored.
Indeed, Israel's recent growing isolation is strengthening the belief that international criticism is mostly hyperbole linked to centuries of anti-Jewish persecution – and something that can be discounted. Though it is unclear how prevalent the belief is among decision makers, analysts note that a feeling of isolation could boost support for provocative and unilateral policies.
Not enough force used?
In a poll of Israeli Jews after the flotilla raid, 61 percent said Israel should not adjust its tactics to curry favor with the international community, according to Princeton, N.J.-based Pechter Middle East Polls. Eighty-five percent of the 500 polled said that Israel either did not use enough force or used the right amount of force.
Some 56 percent said that Israel should resist calls for an international investigation of the raid.
This circular logic widespread among Israelis all across the political spectrum that the whole world is against them is self reinforcing, leading Israelis to embrace the official narrative of events their ultra-nationalist leaders are propagating. A large (but shrinking) number of Israelis still oppose efforts by Bibi's coalition to expand illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, and impose ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem. But most Israelis have accepted Bibi's premise that Israel's need for total security on terms defined by Bibi's hard line clique, legitimizes negating the Palestinians' right to a decent life and self determination.
Beinart's essay has set of a storm of controversy among American Jews and liberal Jews in particular. Please read the whole essay and share your thoughts on his critical look at American Zionism, and an increasing loss of attachment to Israel among younger secular American Jews.