Israel's Real Problem

Commentary By Ron Beasley

In 2010 very Israel's existence depends on support from the United States.  The headline in The Jerusalem Post reads: Emanuel to rabbis: US 'screwed up'.  This shouldn't reassure the Israeli government -  Rahm Emanuel is a slime ball who will tell anybody what they want to hear for political gain.  But as it turns out The hardcore Israeli government's real problem may not be the Obama administration but younger American Jews.  Now Peter Beinart is not one of my favorite people and not someone I usually quote but The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment in the New York Review of Books is worth a read.

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.�

But it's not just a lack of attachment to Israel but much more:

Luntz�s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the
students� views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First,
�they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.� These young
Jews, Luntz explained, �resist anything they see as �group think.�� They
want an �open and frank� discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second,
�young Jews desperately want peace.� When Luntz showed them a series of
ads, one of the most popular was entitled �Proof that Israel Wants
Peace,� and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw
from conquered land. Third, �some empathize with the plight of the
Palestinians.� When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as
violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as
stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined.
They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish
political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military
force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did
not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to
Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism
that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of
peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that
did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only
kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American
Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.

So the radical Zionist have the same demographic problem as the far right Republicans - the bigots are all dying.  

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in
the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And
there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world,
people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians
included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in
the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are
Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One
reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused
to foster�indeed, have actively opposed�a Zionism that challenges
Israel�s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own
Arab citizens. 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.

If the Republican party fails to respond to the changing attitudes of the young the party may become irrelevant.  If the state of Israel fails to respond to the changing attitudes of young Jews in the US it runs the risk of losing it's last friend in the world without which it can't survive.