Transformation: With Obama’s Victory, Marty Peretz Will Lose His Neocon Bedfellows, and Gain Mearsheimer and Me

This article in the Jewish Journal underlines my point of yesterday: worried Jews, paranoid Jews, are sticking with McCain. So Obama might win with only 60 percent of the Jewish vote, and these will be the "more enlightened" (I put that in quotes) Jewish bloc. And don't believe he won't know it. 

Will Obama be able to take the One-Jerusalem/Israel-first crowd for granted as he wheels around Jerusalem and Tehran? No. As my commenters point out, these elements are deep in American Jewish life; and we're not talking about just voters, but the Jewish establishment, or to be precise the Zionist constituents of the American power structure, from the media to the thinktanks to the big-money zipcodes of 10022 and 90210. 

But I continue to insist that if the Jewish vote splits like this, there will be far-reaching consequences. Anti-Zionism is alive on the Jewish left, and its presence on the winning side of the split will give it greater power. In a sense, Jeffrey Goldberg and I will be in the same camp. We will have to make do with one another. Goldberg split from Bill Kristol back in May in this important Times piece; so now he and I and Ehud Olmert and John Mearsheimer agree that the apartheid conditions in the West Bank are destroying the Jewish state, and that the Israel lobby is standing in the way of progress. We disagree about a lot more than we agree about, like what Israel/Palestine should look like in years to come (I'm slowly giving up my two-state illusions), but we recognize that dreams of an undivided Jerusalem have hurt the United States, and also that neoconservatism is over as a real answer to the Arab world.

Neoconservatism really means "transfer." Ethnic cleansing. I'm sure Goldberg is against that. So now he finds himself with the Nakba Jews who are in Obama's base. Or in the company of John Mearsheimer, who has always insisted, in denouncing the occupation and U.S. support for it, that he is talking about Israel's best interests. And Mearsheimer, Glenn Greenwald, Trita Parsi, Tony Karon have all had an effect: Israel-first stuff as a political rallying-post will be suppressed, discredited.

The larger the Jewish vote for McCain, the better by this analysis. The more that distinct bloc of older, worried, Israel-firsters goes down with the McCain ship, the more that Obama can forget about them, and look to the great, young Hannah Mermelstein as the wave of the future; and the more that Jewish political life itself will be transformed.

Marty Peretz and Jeff Goldberg will say I'm wrong. They will say that Jesse Jackson is a lunatic, etc. But a lot of people who are voting for Obama, like myself, believe that what Jackson promised in France is exactly what Obama will try to do: change the water in the aquarium of U.S. policy in Israel/Palestine. Obama's movement supporters, the ones who have been with him since the spring, are for justice in Israel/Palestine. Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown, surely believe this too. Yes the essential political addition of the Mel Levine bloc to Obama's winning coalition has watered down his movement backing, but honey-chile, we're still the movement. We're in. As rightwing conservatives were Ronald Reagan's movement, and he threw them bones. (Yes, we're more marginalized that James Watt and Ed Meese were; but not much more, and less so by the second…)

By the way, Haaretz is showing the great division in American Jewish life in this election here… Only in Haaretz.

The one thing that Bill Kristol could do to try to negate these forces is to join the Obama bandwagon now. Maybe this is David Brooks's calculation, or Charles Krauthammer's– all the conservative columnists who have sandbagged Palin. But they are too late. Bambam doesn't need 'em. As John Dickerson wrote in response to my last post:

Thanks to Jeff Blankfort for ammo.