From the Amazon listing for Peter Beinart’s forthcoming book on Israel’s crisis, and American Jewry’s role in it. I guess this is a second-term book, a book envisioning a breakout role for Barack Obama in his second term, pushing Israelis to allow the creation of a Palestinian state, and politically backed by J Street Jews in doing so:
In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in chilling detail the looming danger to Israeli democracy and the American Jewish establishment’s refusal to confront it. And he offers a fascinating, groundbreaking portrait of the two leaders at the center of the crisis: Barack Obama, America’s first “Jewish president,” a man steeped in the liberalism he learned from his many Jewish friends and mentors in Chicago; and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who considers liberalism the Jewish people’s special curse. These two men embody fundamentally different visions not just of American and Israeli national interests but of the mission of the Jewish people itself.
Beinart concludes with provocative proposals for how the relationship between American Jews and Israel must change, and with an eloquent and moving appeal for American Jews to defend the dream of a democratic Jewish state before it is too late.
Thanks to Max Blumenthal–who read from an essay on the foundations of Zionism at the boycott conference and whose understanding of the Zionist crisis is more fundamental, and realistic, than Beinart’s.
From Beinart’s mouth into someone’s ear. Please?
Thanks again Phil for your generosity and leadership in Philly (and here everyday).
In a fashion parallel to what Rebecca Vilkomerson jokingly said at a panel at PennBDS about J Street, that it is like pot and a gateway to the heroin of JVP, Peter Beinart may play a very helpful role by getting a wider discussion out into the mainstream. For sure he will be invited onto places like the Diane Rehm Show, NPR, and MSNBC for his book circuit in the spring. It will more difficult for the ADL to vilify him given his stature in the mainstream. But once people start listening to him, and understanding the issues and reality on the ground today, they will not be content with more blather about the 2SS.
I am Barack Obama, and I approve this message
” relationship between American Jews and Israel must change, and with an eloquent and moving appeal for American Jews to defend the dream of a democratic Jewish state before it is too late.”
Good luck, the Israel firsters and Israel minons are swarming American Jewry and Obama like killer bees, trying to sting both into their mad Iran war scheme.
It seems from previous discussions that Beinart is completely committed to the idea that liberalism is easily trumped by the needs of national, even ethnic, security. This seems to be endorse, for the wonderful second term, the same old fine words and the same old compromising inertia as we have seen in the first.