American Jews-of-the-Left/Liberal and Their Problem

Barry Rubin attacks Peter Beinart and makes some good points:

We live in an age of intellectual absurdity in which a book by someone who has no notion of Israeli reality and who is, at best, decades (I’d say three) out of date is treated as if he could possibly be of some relevance. Or an organization that has literally never made a single pro-Israel initiative claims to be the country’s best friends. Contrary to the title of Beinart’s book, there is no crisis of Zionism, certainly not in the way he and similarly thinking American Jews believe. The crisis is simply that Israel has become an actually existing country that is defined by an Israel-Jewish patriotism based on a historical Zionism...the problem of American liberal Jews is not to save Israel from reactionary religious extremists and hardline rightists but to come to terms with the views of the majority of Israelis, the centrists and those left of center...Another part of their problem with Israel is that it is, in a sense, too “Jewish” and at odds with their preferred ideology. They want Israel to be what they want America and Europe to be. Yet instead it is too religious; too traditional; too much of a nation-state; too willing to defend itself; and too willing to recognize its enemies even if they are non-white, non-Western, and non-Christian. If your definition of proper Jewishness is to be like Berkeley and Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Israel is not going to make the grade.

but it is his "PS" that delighted me. Here:

Special Bonus Feature: A Short History of Jewish History and the Centrality of Settlements 737 BCE, Jews establish settlements, leading Assyrians to invade. 587 BCE, Jews build new apartments in settlements. In response, Babylonians conquer land and exile the Jews. 70 CE, Jewish settlements produce Dead Sea Scrolls. Left-wing pseudo-intellectuals do not boycott. Temple Falls 1096 CE Jews think about establishing settlements. Crusades begin and Jews are massacred. 1648 CE Jews in Ukraine make kugel on settlements in Ukraine. Cossacks begin armed boycott movement. 1917 CE Shocked by Jews clinging to their religion, reactionary Zionism, and pseudo-revolutionary Bundism, heroic Bolshevik Jews save the day by helping bring about the Russian Revolution, close down synagogues, outlaw Yiddish, and put Zionists and Bundists into concentration camps. And so on down to the present.

Great. ^