I hope that such an enlightenment can emerge within the Jewish community before there is a powerful resurgence of anti-semitism in this country (which looks inevitable if things continue on the current trajectory.)

You can be post-zionist. What is that?

Allow others to be Zionists.

And criticize some likud, npr style delusionary zionists.

The majority of Israelis want to be Israelis, and remain thankful to the early Zionists for their sacrifice.

A good article in Haaretz by Ruth Gavison:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/909325.html

Yglesias (and Josh Marshall, by the way) contributed mighthly for the lobby efforts. They are not to be trusted.

Its in a Jewish state renouncing expansion, and at peace with its neighbors.

In a free-trade and free-travel zone, but that does NOT have to wrestle with the need for common principles of governance with those that it does not share a value system.

Maybe in the future. But, to impose a form of democracy onto a disparate populace, is what we are "attempting" in Iraq, which I assume you agree is a gamble if not a folly.

Which value system would that be, Richard? Are you referring to the one on display in the occupied territories ? That shown in the deliberate starvation and economic sabotage of a whole people – the terrorising and the humiliation of the old, women and children – the land grabbing, the bulldosing of homes, the 'targeted assassinations ?

Listen to Tony Judt:

"I remember well, in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War – and how little attention anyone paid either to the condition of the Palestinians or to Israel's earlier collusion with France and Britain in the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. In politics and in policy-making circles only old-fashioned conservative Arabists expressed any criticism of the Jewish state; even neo-Fascists rather favored Zionism, on traditional anti-Semitic grounds.

…

As recently as the early 1990s, most people in the world were only vaguely aware of the "West Bank" and what was happening there. Even those who pressed the Palestinians' case in international forums conceded that almost no one was listening. Israel could still do as it wished.

The Israeli nakba

But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations," the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish – which means that Israel's behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel. Until very recently the carefully burnished image of an ultra-modern society – built by survivors and pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats – still held sway over international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.

…

… it has redefined Israel forever. It has become commonplace to compare Israel at best to an occupying colonizer, at worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans. In this capacity Israel elicits scant sympathy even when its own citizens suffer: Dead Israelis – like the occasional assassinated white South African in the apartheid era, or British colonists hacked to death by native insurgents – are typically perceived abroad not as the victims of terrorism but as the collateral damage of their own government's mistaken policies.

Such comparisons are lethal to Israel's moral credibility. They strike at what was once its strongest suit: the claim of being a vulnerable island of democracy and decency in a sea of authoritarianism and cruelty; an oasis of rights and freedoms surrounded by a desert of repression. But democrats don't fence into Bantustans helpless people whose land they have conquered, and free men don't ignore international law and steal other men's homes. The contradictions of Israeli self-presentation – "we are very strong/we are very vulnerable"; "we are in control of our fate/we are the victims"; "we are a normal state/we demand special treatment" – are not new: they have been part of the country's peculiar identity almost from the outset. And Israel's insistent emphasis upon its isolation and uniqueness, its claim to be both victim and hero, were once part of its David versus Goliath appeal.

Collective cognitive dysfunction

But today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania – "everyone's out to get us" – no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt's famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles," describe Israel as "Serbia with nukes."

Israel has stayed the same, but the world – as I noted above – has changed. Whatever purchase Israel's self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.

…

And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This – the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic – is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.

…

… Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized – but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" – it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.

…

Something is changing in the United States.

…

This new willingness to take one's distance from Israel is not confined to foreign policy specialists. As a teacher I have also been struck in recent years by a sea-change in the attitude of students. One example among many: Here at New York University I was teaching this past month a class on post-war Europe. I was trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco's Spain has such a special place in our moral imagination: as a reminder of lost struggles, a symbol of oppression in an age of liberalism and freedom, and a land of shame that people boycotted for its crimes and repression. I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my great surprise most of the class – including many of the sizable Jewish contingent – nodded approval. The times they are indeed a-changing. "

As to Steve's ridiculous non sequiturs about the esteem Israel is held in (by Palestinians of all people): they are best passed over in silence. Go and inform yourself Steve – and don't come to us mouthing the platitudes of the MSM on a leader who has become inconvenient to the "New York money men", recently more precisely defined by Hersh as the Jewish money men.

"The Usual Suspect," Jeffrey Goldberg, New Republic
link to tnr.com

The proposal is based on the concept of consensual governance, which is most obviously met by a two-state solution, including a Palestinian state and a Jewish state.

There is no "post-Zionism" until the characteristics of confident safety for Jews as Jews is reached.

And then, its an if.

Its a nice phrase, but without meaning.

"Israel Shouldn’t Get a Free Pass: Real Debate Is Not Anti-Semitic"
Jonathan Tasini, Playboy, Oct. 2007
link to sabbah.biz

(CAMERA has already attacked them, but this is what happens when you don't own 100% of the media — the truth keeps leaking out.)

Well, he won't frighten the horses with that term.

For the rest of his review a sentence of Judt's article above will do:

"And the long cultivated persecution mania – "everyone's out to get us" – no longer elicits sympathy."