Peter Beinart, former editor of Marty Peretz' New Republic has written a groundbreaking piece in the New York Review Of Books about the end of the "pro-Israel" lobby's hold on American Jews.
Beinart, in his late 30's, is one of the journalistic stars of his generation (he was editor of TNR at 28). He comes from an Orthodox background.
He is also pro-Israel. (In Beinart's case, I use the term pro-Israel without the quotation marks that I use when I describe organizations like AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee and The Israel Project which are in the "pro-Israel" business and insouciantly support policies that are destructive to Israel)..
Beinart cares about Israel and I think he is rather sad to have to conclude that most young American Jews do not. As the excerpt below points out, Israel is very foreign to young Jews. And that means that the the lobby's base is eroding daily and will soon consist only of seniors (mostly the baby boomers' parents) and the very Orthodox (a small percentage of the Jewish population).
Basically, the decline of the lobby is good news for America, for Jews and for Israel. That is because it is primarily the clout of the lobby that has led the US government to support an occupation that has virtually eliminated America's influence in the Middle East, has turned off younger Jews to Judaism, and will -- unless ended by Israel under US pressure -- lead to Israel's demise. The "pro-Israel" lobby is anything but pro-Israel.
Read the whole article. Start with the excerpt. But don't confuse one very important piece with the trend it is describing. It is the "pro-Israel" establishment and the Israeli government's horrific policies (capped by the Gaza war) that has produced this sea change. But also know that the fact that this piece is written by Peter Beinart makes it a major part of the very phenomenon it describes.
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn't. "Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel," he reported. "Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word 'they' rather than 'us' to describe the situation."That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that "non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders," with many professing "a near-total absence of positive feelings." In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.
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Unfortunately, by focusing on only Jewish identity and Israel's domestic politics, he leaves out the other part of the equation. Do the Palestinians want peace? Do Arab leaders and Islamic radicals accept the idea of Jews living in the Mideast? How does one counter genocidal ambitions of one's neighbors while upholding the highest ideals? Is it possible to believe in the peaceful intentions of a population that votes Hamas into power, cheers for homocide bombers, and builds new stadiums to terrorists who murdered young children because they were Jews?
Still, this powerful article deserves to be widely read and considered. Israel remains a work in progress - like the United States, and the future remains uncertain as our Islamic imperialist enemies grow ever more aggressive.
Its time for Israel to grown up and act like a nation instead of a snot nosed bully with big brother Uncle Sam to back them up no matter how ignorantly they act.
It will only take a 9/11 type event hyped by a complicit ,hawkish corporate media to get them to support Israel .
Remember the double standard. Christians and Jews killing Muslims is for peace and security.
Muslims killing Christians and Jews is for revenge and terrorism .
A majority of Americans are not ""pro-war'' and yet we have been in one war after another since 1939.Wars of necessity or wars of choice? Freedom fighter or Terrorist?
How many Jewish and Christian acts of violence do you find? How many "misunderstanders of the religion of peace"/ jihadists have committed how many acts of violence this century? Let's review the major crimes: 9/11, the Bali bombing, the Mumbai attack, the London subway attack, Fort Hood, and the Madrid bombing come to mind. All acts of mass murder committed in the name of Allah against infidels.
Let's grow up, acnowledge that ideas matter, and not all religions are the same.
(1) In a letter he sent in 1902 to Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, Lord Rothschild explained why he could not support a Jewish state in Palestine. He wrote that he “should view with horror the establishment of a Jewish colony pure and simple; such a colony would be Imperium Imperio; it would be a Ghetto with the prejudice of the Ghetto; it would be a small petty Jewish state, orthodox and illiberal, excluding the Gentile and the Christian.”
(2) In 1944, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, expressed himself as follows: "The concept of a racial state - the Hitlerian concept- is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful global war in which we are involved. . . , I urge that we do nothing to set us back on the road to the past. To project at this time the creation of a Jewish state or commonwealth is to launch a singular innovation in world affairs which might well have incalculable consequences."
Yet modern Israel remains the most multicultural, immigrant friendly nation in the modern Mideast. Religious minorities not only exist in large numbers, they elect representatives to the Knesset and boldly exercise the freedom of speech that is unequaled anywhere within 500 miles of Jerusalem. Israel remains a secular, western-style democracy in a neighborhood of kings, dictators, and theocrats.
Perhaps those quotations played a critical role in preventing Israel from becoming the narrow, bigoted, and ethnically pure state that it might have become. I don't know, but modern Israel is far closer to Los Angeles in spirit than Kabul, Medina, or Islamabad.
Of course, the inability of the Palestinian Authority to even control Gaza also raises some questions about their ability to actually deliver peace in exchange for land too. Yet the vision of two modern, peaceful states living side by side remains the goal of the vast majority of Israeli citizens. The question, as so often, remains "how".
So for instance when Walt & Mearsheimer put out their article talking about the Israel lobby's influence over things like the Iraq war, Beinart was one the most prominent people to denounce it
I don't think he will ever say anything that contradicts official talking points, except maybe a passing word about how he opposes settlements like all the US leaders do. But the minute you start to say, that money should be cut off if they don't stop the settlements it becomes clear that he supports them unconditionally
Asking a rational, decent person to support a political state at the expense of one's conscience is not enlightened or sustainable.
Turkish aid is instrumental in helping Hamas clean and prepare the Gaza port, in preparation for the arrival of the anti-Israel protest flotilla later this month.
Pro-PLO organizations in Europe that have aligned themselves with Hamas are planning a flotilla of aid to the Gaza Strip. The coordinators of what some call the “ship intifada” want to avoid confrontation with Egypt, but appear to be seeking a confrontation with the Israeli navy, backed by media and diplomatic campaigns.
This past January, a senior Hamas operative in Britain named Muhammad Sawalha, who was involved in launching the previous flotilla, said the next convoy will avoid the type of confrontation that occurred the previous time with Egypt, and that next time, “the confrontation will be directly with the Zionist enemy itself on the high seas.”
Swiss MP Josef Zisyadis, one of several European MPs and UN personnel who will be on the ships, together with nearly 600 others, threatened that “if Israel tries to stop the ships, we will sue her in European courts
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/137405
Their intent is to actually go there and do things, which of course, is a political message.
you ask "if they're really interested in trying to improve conditions, why don't they actually GO there, and do things like build better roads, and housing?"
The answer to that is "Israel is preventing them by deployment of air, sea and land armed forces."