THE TRUE liberal friend of Israel, Beinart argues, is none other than Barack Obama. In a highly intriguing chapter, Beinart suggests that Obama is the antithesis of Netanyahu. It is Obama who was profoundly shaped by his liberal Jewish mentors in Chicago, among them Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, himself a protégé of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel played a distinctive role during the civil-rights movement, scolding Jews for not doing more to forward liberal causes. His disciple, Wolf, condemned American Jews for emphasizing victimhood, observing that in “Jewish school or synagogue . . . one does not now learn about God or the Midrash or Zionism nearly as carefully as one learns about the Holocaust.” He decried the readiness of Jewish leaders to employ the Holocaust to depict Israel as besieged by anti-Semites. What does this have to do with Obama? Beinart’s answer: “Quite a bit.” He notes that Obama’s mentors were Jews and that he was embedded in a Chicago Jewish community that was profoundly estranged from the “see-no-evil Zionism of the American Jewish establishment.” One such mentor was Judge Abner Mikva, who signed a public statement in 2010 that read: “We abhor the continuing occupation that has persisted for far too long; it cannot and should not be sustained.”

No matter how much he soaked up this worldview, Obama’s determined efforts to revive the peace process went nowhere. Beinart offers a close reconstruction of what he calls the administration’s humbling. He writes that the clash in May 2011 over the 1967 Green Line was the last time Obama endorsed liberal Zionism. Newspaper articles were circulating with the message that Jewish donors would refuse to support him. Yet Beinart notes that a September 2011 Gallup poll found that Jewish support for Obama had not significantly eroded. But perhaps Obama, in largely abandoning the attempt to bring about negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, was simply acceding to reality. The ability of America to push the Netanyahu government to alter its policies was virtually nonexistent, particularly given the emergence of an anti-Obama Republican House in 2010.

Still, as Beinart sees it, a struggle for Jewish democracy has emerged. After pasting Jewish organizations, Beinart goes on to argue that younger American Jews are simply becoming indifferent to Israel’s fate. But perhaps some of them will become more attached to Israel as they grow older. What’s more, American influence on Israel may have passed its meridian. No doubt Israel relies on America for financial support. But questioning that support has become taboo. And demographic and political trends inside Israel suggest that country will continue to move to the Right. Thus, even if Netanyahu or a future prime minister wanted to adopt Obama’s political agenda, he couldn’t do so without committing political suicide. The Israeli Left lost much of its political credibility after the collapse of the Oslo accords and the second Palestinian intifada, which was triggered when Ariel Sharon took a stroll through the Temple Mount in September 2000.

But Beinart clings to the hope that the old-time Zionist faith can be revived. He proposes a rather complicated scheme in which America should recognize that there are two Israels. The first is democratic Israel. The second is the West Bank—nondemocratic Israel. He proposes a boycott of the West Bank and argues that the government should exempt settler goods from its free-trade deal with Israel and end tax-deductible gifts to charities that fund settlements. “Every time any American newspaper calls Israel a democracy,” he says, “we should urge that it include the caveat: only within the green line.”

This is cutting things rather finely. How, for example, could anyone discriminate between goods produced in the occupied territories and Israel proper? More fervent critics of Israel will say that his complicated scheme is merely an effort to salve his conscience; supporters will say that he is contributing to Israel’s delegitimization. There is a whiff of the crusader (also present in Beinart’s first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again) in his insistence that Israel can be made to follow a more righteous path if enough good will and effort can be applied by American Jews upon Israel. It’s a noble aspiration. But it is not necessarily a realistic one. On the broader question of whether the old-time Zionism that once permeated American Jewish organizations can be revived, it is impossible to reach a definitive answer, just as it is on the question of whether younger American Jews really are—or will remain—as disenchanted with Israel as Beinart suggests. In any case, there was a good deal of naïveté also in the older version of Zionism and its faith in prospects for an amicable agreement with the Palestinians over the issue of territory. It was the Arab states, after all, that rejected the 1947 United Nations partition plan, which would have granted the Palestinians far more land than is contemplated in any current agreement. The deep hostility to Israel and anti-Semitism endemic to Arab societies prompted them to attempt to wipe out Israel for decades rather than reach a settlement. Now they are confronted with a far more powerful country than they could ever have imagined.

If Beinart is longer on diagnosis than he is on solutions, he is not the first observer to be confounded by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has eviscerated many canards that pass for profundity about Israel—that to criticize it is tantamount to anti-Semitism and that Israel faces a new 1939. And the truth may be that there isn’t that much America can do to attenuate the hostilities. Each party in the conflict, as the historian Walter Laqueur once observed to me, has not yet experienced enough pain to want to terminate it. Anyway, it may already be too late for Israel to reach a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Perhaps a single state will eventually emerge if Israel keeps up its settlement expansion. Then Israel will continue down the road to becoming a pariah state, one that justifies its self-inflicted isolation in order to impose even more drastic measures on the Palestinians, thereby creating an unvirtuous cycle of events.

Beinart would like to head off such an inglorious prospect. Certainly his book will stimulate debate about America’s relationship with Israel, and this is a good thing. For too long a kind of omertà has prevailed when it comes to discussing Israel in America. But it is difficult to assess what effect this debate will have upon Israel itself. Beinart probably overestimates the power of American Jews to help determine Israel’s future. Israel is responsible for itself. A solution, if one is forthcoming, will be hammered out between the Palestinians and Israelis. It will not be made in America.

Still, Beinart’s main point stands. There is no plausible reason to swaddle admiration for Israel in comforting illusions and fables about the course it is following. The longer Israel occupies the West Bank, the more it fuels the very terrorist forces that plague it and America. That occupation also means that, to a large extent, the nimbus of a progressive, liberal Israel is fading away. It is being replaced with a nightmarish vision of a state based on a modern form of colonial rule over a hostile people. This inconvenient truth is bad for the Palestinians, bad for Israeli democracy and bad for America. It has been ignored and suppressed and denied for decades. No longer. Beinart’s eloquent book ensures that it has now been fully exposed.

Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.

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