Despite their denunciations of liberal Jews as feckless and foolhardy, however, the neocons have failed to produce many votes for the GOP, and this failure is a perennial source of vexation for them. In 2008, Obama won 78 percent of the Jewish vote. His tally may slip slightly in 2012 but will surely remain well over 70 percent. What’s more, neocons have for years attracted much criticism from some liberal Jews for their defense of Israel. In his searing 1982 book Jews Without Mercy: A Lament, author and social critic Earl Shorris declared that the neocons’ ruthlessness both at home and abroad meant that they were no longer truly Jews. Publications such as the New York Review of Books have steadily chronicled and criticized the adamantine stance of both the neocons and successive Israeli governments.

BUT NO criticism has approached the barrage unleashed by Beinart in his new book, which explores today’s Israel against the backdrop of the early concepts put forth for the Jewish state in the late nineteenth century. If Herzl, who envisioned the idea of Israel in his 1896 book Der Judenstaat, could see the country today, he would probably be astounded by its technological prowess and dismayed by its political system. Early Zionism was an offshoot of European nationalism, which is why some secular Jewish socialists regarded it with misgivings and even hostility. Herzl himself had a capacious and hopeful view of the future Jewish state, which he limned in his novel Altneuland, or Old New Land. Herzl and his novel form the intellectual scaffolding for Beinart’s new book. As Beinart correctly notes, Herzl’s work propounds a Jewish state that cherishes liberal ideals. In it, Israel is a model of technological progress. Jews and Arabs are able to work side by side, enjoying the fruits of their labor. In many ways, Israeli president Shimon Peres’s vision of a technologically advanced “new Middle East” that subordinates conflict to economic cooperation is rooted in Altneuland. The Israel of the novel promises freedom of speech and religion as well as rabbis that enjoy “no privileged voice in the state.” The protagonist, one David Littwak, speaks Arabic and announces that his party does “not ask to what race or religion a man belongs. If he is a man, that is enough for us.” The malcontent is one Rabbi Geyer, who is modeled on Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna. Geyer wants to strip non-Jews of the right to vote. Geyer loses the election, and Herzl includes an epilogue in which he beseeches his readers to make the Zionist dream come true. As Beinart puts it:

Herzl knew that a tolerant, cosmopolitan republic like Venice was not preordained, that Jews were entirely capable of birthing a Boer state. This conflict, between the desire to build a Jewish state premised on liberal democratic principles and the temptation to flout those principles in the name of Jewish security and power, runs throughout the Zionist enterprise.

To some extent, the Israel of Herzl’s musings does exist today. The country’s Arab citizens can vote and serve in the Knesset. They have more rights than Arabs do in a number of Arab countries. And Israel is a democracy. But only—and this is one of Beinart’s major contentions—up to a point.

Beinart emphasizes that the Green Line—the dividing marker between Israel’s pre- and post-1967 borders—is steadily being effaced by the growth of settlements. In 1980, only about twelve thousand Jews lived beyond the Green Line; today that number is about three hundred thousand. As Israel establishes new facts on the ground, it becomes increasingly difficult to contemplate the construction of a Palestinian state that is contiguous. The word “contiguity” appears a lot in Beinart’s account. The Netanyahu government, he suggests, is working overtime to thwart the existence of any contiguous Palestinian state. In 2010, Netanyahu called Ariel, a settlement that stretches no less than thirteen miles into the West Bank, “the heart of our country.” Meanwhile, the country’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, refers to what he terms the “enemy within”—Israeli Arabs—and espouses what is delicately called “population transfer”—either the extrusion of Israeli Arabs by redrawing the map to boot them out of Israel proper or direct expulsion to other Arab states.

The occupation of the West Bank, in other words, is having profoundly corrosive effects upon Israeli democracy. Attachment to liberal institutions is not foreordained. Beinart notes, “In Israel today, it is not only Arab citizens who are routinely described in the language of treason, so are Jews who actively oppose Israel’s policies in the West Bank.” Yet even with mounting evidence of Israel’s woes, says Beinart, the American Jewish establishment has remained quiescent. Why?

One reason is that Netanyahu himself, Beinart says, played a pivotal role in creating it. He attended high school in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, and began his career in 1982 as a political attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington. He soon became a star on the lecture circuit. According to Beinart, “As a Revisionist with no ties to Zionism’s socialist heritage, he was perfectly placed to forge ties to the conservative Jews who were gaining influence in an American Jewish establishment newly freed from its own left-liberal roots.” Beinart points out that in Washington and later in New York, where Netanyahu served as Israel’s UN ambassador, he grew close to Malcolm Hoenlein, who in 1986 became the top staffer at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. He also developed friendships with major right-wing Zionists—including cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder and the real-estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman, both of whom went on to chair the conference; with Sheldon Adelson, one of the largest donors to AIPAC and to the more right-leaning Zionist Organization of America; and with Irving Moskowitz, who provides major funding to settler and prosettler groups in Israel and the United States. Thus, when Netanyahu ran for the Knesset in 1988, he was not especially well-known in Israel but already a celebrity among activist Jews in America.

Jewish conservatives, Beinart suggests, became Netanyahu’s enablers. They not only helped fund his political aspirations but also sought to subvert Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s signing of the Oslo accords and his requests that the U.S. Congress provide the Palestinian Authority with financial aid. One former AIPAC staffer told Beinart that the board members spent the Rabin years “waiting for Bibi to ascend.” Upon his ascension to the prime ministership in 1996, he and his American backers worked overtime to foil Bill Clinton’s attempts to promote peace. Instead of creating a unity government with Labor, Netanyahu chose to create one with some of the most retrograde splinter parties, telling Clinton aide Dennis Ross that a true leader never jettisons “his tribe.”

Beinart traces Netanyahu’s own tribal passions back to his father, Benzion. Benzion Netanyahu was an acolyte of the right-wing revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, who believed that any idea of an accommodation with the Palestinians was delusional. Beinart goes back to some of the editorials that Benzion wrote for a revisionist newspaper in New York called Zionews. “The prowess of Jewish youth in Palestine should serve as a warning that the blood of the old warrior race is still alive in the Jewish people,” one of his editorials read. In 2009, at the age of ninety-nine, he remained just as truculent, stating that Israel should retake the Gaza Strip: “We should conquer any disputed territory in the land of Israel. . . . You don’t return land.” Beinart adds, “Unsurprisingly, racism pervades Benzion Netanyahu’s writing.” His model for Israel is the Ottoman Empire, which hanged Arabs in town squares for even minor infractions. Netanyahu fils has dismissed talk of his father’s influence upon him as “psychobabble.” The evidence suggests otherwise. Numerous Netanyahu advisers have testified to his father’s Vulcan mind lock. In January 2012, Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly identified the New York Times and the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz as Israel’s two greatest threats. And Netanyahu himself has suggested that Arabs are savages; Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that Netanyahu referred to him in 2009 as a “wild beast of a man.”

If Beinart sees Netanyahu’s skill at wooing America’s conservative Jews as one factor in the corruption of the Jewish establishment, he singles out its embrace of victimhood as another. In his book Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, historian David Biale pointed out that the notion that Jews have always been victims is something of a consoling myth. During the Holocaust, of course, Jews were victims of the Nazi regime, which sought nothing less than the utter destruction of European Jewry. But beginning in the 1970s, a preoccupation with the Holocaust supplanted a wider understanding of Judaism and Israel. Beinart says, “In its embrace of victimhood as a strategy for dealing with gentiles and younger Jews, the American Jewish establishment was turning away from the universalism that had defined it for a half-century.” As a new emphasis on victimhood arose, American Jews began to distance themselves from the organizations that purported to represent them. Even though most American Jews are liberal and want to halt settlement growth, the pool of donors to Jewish causes has shriveled to a point where an emboldened minority espouses conservative sentiments. “Far more than in the past,” Beinart warns, “a small number of large donors now sustain American Jewish groups, and far more than in the past, they set the agenda.” The main interest of these organizations, he says, is in fundraising rather than pointing to shortcomings in Israel that might upset their donors. He singles out for particular criticism Hoenlein of the Presidents’ Conference; Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL; Howard Kohr of AIPAC; and David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “All have built their careers on stories of Jewish victimhood and survival. None accept that we live in a new era in Jewish history in which our challenges stem less from weakness than from power.” The contrast, Beinart writes, with such American Jewish leaders as Louis Brandeis and Stephen Wise, who saw Israel’s creation as a pathway to achieving Herzlian liberal ideals, could hardly be starker.

Pullquote: The true liberal friend of Israel, Beinart argues, is none other than Barack Obama.Image: Essay Types: Book Review