Responding to Beinart’s “Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”

A friend just asked my view of Peter Beinart’s recent and controversial article “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.” Beinart describes the declining attachment of younger, non-Orthodox American Jews to Israel and argues that this results from the disjunction between their liberal political values and the increasing absence of those values in Israeli politics. Here’s a few quick reactions. Ultimately, there’s little the “American Jewish Establishment” could do about this even if it wanted to. The Israeli electorate – both Jewish and Arab – has to work this out. At the moment, as an outside observer, I do not see any Israeli Jews articulating a vision that has the power to counter the disturbing fact that Beinart cites – more than half of Israeli Jewish high school students favor denying parliament representation to the 20% of citizens who are Arab and who currently have representation in parliament. Last, Beinart himself is caught in a dead end. He yearns for a secular and universalist Zionism that has little chance of gaining traction today. Zionism grounded in “secular,” rather than religious, terms relies on an “ethnic” understanding of Judaism that is inherently inconsistent with a modern “universalistic” understanding of a State of Israel where 20% of the population is not Jewish. The only way one could argue persuasively for a “progressive” Zionist vision of Israel would have to be from Jewish religious beliefs that include both the Jewish people’s connection to the land of Israel and the understanding that for all purposes, including governance, all people are all equally created in God’s image, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or non-believer.