Israel: The eroding consensus If America is to be a useful friend, it owes clarity to Israel, no less than Israel and the world owe justice - and a nation - to the Palestinian people

If America is to be a useful friend, it owes clarity to Israel, no less than Israel and the world owe justice - and a nation - to the Palestinian people [REUTERS]  David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, is arguably the most influential Jewish American journalist. Now 50, Remnick became editor at 37 after an impressive career covering the collapse of the Soviet Union for the Washington Post. His book about that incredible period, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, won a Pulitzer in 1994. Remnick believes that fear is misplaced and that Obama should think big despite the pressure from the donors and White House aides mired in the status quo. Over the years he has written about Israel and the Palestinians with some regularity. Although he claims no special expertise in the area (other than being a strongly identifying Jew), his editor's "comments" indicate that he knows the issue well. In fact, his pieces are usually far more sophisticated than the news and opinion pieces that the supposed experts regularly produce for the prestige newspapers and journals. Over Remnick's past 13 years as editor of The New Yorker, his attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have evolved. In the early years, Remnick's views were decidedly mainstream. Though no Likudnik, he did give Israel the benefit of the doubt in most situations. Back then, he clearly believed that although Israel often blundered, even badly, it still was sincerely seeking peace. Of course, holding those views was significantly easier a decade or two ago than it is today. Today those views seem only to be held by either true believers (the "Israel can do no wrong" crowd) or politicians determined to ingratiate themselves with donors whose politics can be summed up as "Israel First". There aren't a whole lot of those donors but it doesn't take very many to intimidate politicians. And intimidated they are. But established journalists like Remnick don't have to be intimidated (although ingratiating oneself with rich and powerful people is not an unknown phenomenon among writers). Trailblazers Today Remnick is treading the path blazed last year by Peter Beinart, another influential Jewish American writer who had been editor of The New Republic at 24. A year ago, Beinart broke with the AIPAC crowd with a blockbuster piece in The New York Review of Booksexplaining how the combination of right-wing Israeli policies and the mindless chauvinism of AIPAC and its allies had succeeded in alienating young Jews from Israel. Beinart's piece enraged the pro-Israel establishment, although it knew, from its own surveys, that identification with Israel is strongest among those in their 80s and then drops precipitously among the now-ageing "baby boomers" and their kids. (One Ivy Leaguer recently told me that even J Street is a hard sell among Jewish kids. As for AIPAC, forget about it. In fact, any passion for Israel at all makes you pretty much an outlier.) A year later, David Remnick has crossed Beinart's Rubicon. In a "Talk of the Town" essay in his magazine, Remnick definitively asserts that it is time for the United States to put a comprehensive peace plan (exchanging the territories for peace) on the table and to push it to fruition. He writes that the Obama administration obviously knows this, but is simply afraid of the implications for "domestic politics". Remnick believes that fear is misplaced and that Obama should think big despite the pressure from the donors and White House aides mired in the status quo. For decades, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, and other such right-leaning groups have played an outsized role in American politics, pressuring members of congress and presidents with their capacity to raise money and swing elections. But democratic presidents in particular should recognize that these groups are hardly representative and should be met head on. Obama won seventy-eight per cent of the Jewish vote; he is more likely to lose some of that vote if he reverses his position on, say, abortion than if he tries to organise international opinion on the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, some senior members of the administration have internalised the political restraints that they believe they are under, and cannot think beyond them. Some, like Dennis Ross, who has served five presidents, can think only in incremental terms. This is strong stuff, especially when it comes from David Remnick. But it isn't all. Netanyahu's 'chilling' influence A sizeable chunk of the piece is devoted to Remnick's explanation of why it is silly to expect prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to abandon his decades-long commitment to the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The thinking goes that: Just as Nixon set aside decades of Cold War ideology and red-baiting in the interests of practical global politics, Netanyahu would transcend his own history, and his party's, to end the suffering of a dispossessed people and regain Israel's moral standing. Not going to happen, writes Remnick. He believes that the reason is the influence of Netanyahu's 101-year-old father, Benzion Netanyahu. Remnick tells of a meeting he had with the prime minister's father, writing that the elder Netanyahu "invited me to his house for lunch, and I am not sure that I have ever heard more outrageously reactionary table talk. The disdain for Arabs, for Israeli liberals, for any Americans to the left of the neoconservatives was chilling." Add to that a "coalition government that includes anti-democratic, even proto-fascistic ministers, such as Avigdor Lieberman," and it is clear that Obama's sweet talk has not a chance of accomplishing anything. And that is why Obama has to act decisively and without waiting for permission from AIPAC, Dennis Ross, or the Democratic party's fundraisers. The importance of an Obama plan is not that Netanyahu accept it right away; the Palestinian leadership, which is weak and suffers from its own issues of legitimacy, might not embrace it immediately, either. Rather, it is important as a way for the United States to assert that it stands not with the supporters of Greater Israel but with what the writer Bernard Avishai calls "Global Israel", the constituencies that accept the moral necessity of a Palestinian state and understand the dire cost of Israeli isolation. Remnick concludes that it is time for the United States to stop telling the Israelis what they want to hear, and start telling them what almost all policy-makers actually believe. A friend in need... If America is to be a useful friend, it owes clarity to Israel, no less than Israel and the world owe justice - and a nation - to the Palestinian people. A few years ago, there is no chance that either David Remnick or Peter Beinart would be saying these things. And a few years before that they wouldn't even be advocating a Palestinian state at all. And before that it wasn't even safe to talk about a discrete Palestinian people. But it's all changing for two reasons. First, at long last, it is common and uncontroversial knowledge that the Palestinian people have suffered mightily at the hands of Israel, with the support of the United States. Second, it has become abundantly clear that Israel's isolation is increasing at such a rapid rate (Turkey and Egypt distancing themselves from Israel in a single year) that the continuation of the occupation (and the conflict that emanates from it) threatens the existence of Israel itself. That is why there will be more Remnicks and more Beinarts. Not because influential Americans like them are indifferent to Israel's survival. But because they aren't. During Purim, we hear a lot about who hates the Jews (Haman), but what about who likes the Jews? The Jewish holiday that is full of upside-down surprises is a perfect time to confront a difficult truth: Americans love Jews -- a lot. Even more than they love Protestants and Catholics. As a 38-year-old American Jew, I am a product of my generation's anti-Semitism education machine. For me and probably most older Jews, it is difficult to digest the data. But the numbers, which come from multiple respected studies in the last five years, are irrefutable. In their recent and remarkable survey of American religion, American Grace, sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell report about the "feeling thermometer" they use to measure how Americans feel about various religious groups. They asked respondents to indicate "how warm they feel toward different social groups on a scale of 0 to 100." In the period they gathered the data, 2006-2007, Americans said they had warmer feelings toward Jews than any other religious group -- even a degree or two higher than Catholics and Mainline Protestants. Readers who might be tempted to doubt the veracity of the data (after all, one of the study's authors, Putnam, converted to Judaism when he got married and raised his children as Jews) must also digest a decade of studies by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which show exactly the same results: that American attitudes toward Jews are as positive -- or even a few degrees warmer -- as attitudes toward Catholics, and significantly higher than toward any other religious group (the Pew data does not ask about attitudes toward Protestants). Polling reports from the Anti-Defamation League also point toward a growing American love for Jews. In 2009, an ADL nationwide survey of Americans found "anti-Semitic attitudes equal to the lowest level in all the years of taking the pulse of the American attitudes toward Jews. The survey found that 12% of Americans hold anti-Semitic views, a decline from 15% in 2007 and matching lowest figure ever recorded by ADL, in 1998." There are only two ways to interpret these multiple sources of data: either Americans now believe it is completely socially unacceptable to tell a pollster that they don't like Jews, or Americans really do have really positive feelings towards Jews. As a rabbi who works primarily in interfaith settings, I have countless personal anecdotes that suggest we have entered an era of philo-Semitism in America. A large class of evangelical seminary students hangs on every word I teach them about the rabbinic tradition or the biblical prophets. Non-Jews come in to the office, ask me about the collection of Hebrew volumes of the Talmud, and ask me, with deep curiosity and respect, to show it to them. Wherever I go, hosts go out of their way to make sure there is something kosher I can eat. These are superficial examples, of course, but that is exactly the point: at a superficial level, instead of treating Jews with disdain, fear or disgust, large majorities of Americans now have positive associations with Jews. This data, of course, does not mean that real threats to the Jewish people do not exist. Anti-Semitism remains rampant and goes unchecked in countries around the world. Hateful attitudes toward Israel, whether one counts such attitudes as anti-Semitic or not, proliferate. Some Iranian leaders continue to threaten the destruction of Israel and the Jews and are working diligently to obtain the tools needed to carry out such threats. All these realities mean that philo-Semitic attitudes in America are that much more unique and compelling. In America today, threats toward Jews are not external but rather internal; millions of intermarried couples are not raising Jews (even though many are), and levels of participation in Jewish life by post-b'nai mitzvah teens is dangerously low. Paying attention to American philo-Semitism matters so much because young Jews are caught in a major cognitive dissonance: They are taught from an early age that the world hates the Jews, but they feel fully embraced by their American peers. Putnam and Campbell note that since the 1960s "anti-Semitism has continued to fall through generational replacement -- younger people are less likely to harbor anti-Semitic views than older generations." Are American Jews ready for a narrative of philo-Semitism? I recently presented this data to an adult education class organized by a regional chapter of the American Jewish Committee. I asked the learners to rank different religious groups by likability by Americans. Of 20 learners, 19 got it wrong. Middle East scholar Aaron Miller has said, "Jews worry for a living, because the arc of history has taught them to." Is it any surprise we have trouble hearing a narrative of philo-Semitism? American Jews regularly tune in to stories like the Jewish passenger who caused a plane to land early when he pulled out his tefillin, an eruv (community border that allows carrying on the Sabbath) in the Hampton's that is meeting resistance, and a grave marker that was desecrated by hoodlums. Such stories make headlines in American Jewish press precisely because they are exceptional and not the norm, and because they feed a narrative we expect. Yet these headlines do not represent mainstream American Jewish life in 21st century America. Three recent major newscycles, each of which would have been devastating for American Jews two generations ago, suggest how powerful this new context of philo-Semitism really is: Madoff, Mezvinsky and Muslims. Why didn't coverage of the Bernie Madoff scandal spiral into anti-Semitic rants about evil Jewish business practices? With an identifiable Jewish antagonist bilking everyone -- even nonprofit endowments -- it was the perfect setup for anti-Semitic headlines, cartoons and jokes. But they never materialized. And where was the American uproar when the daughter of an American president married Marc Mezvinsky wearing a tallit under a chuppah in a ceremony by a rabbi? And if you were asked to choose the most likely faith group to serve as America's scapegoat, could the answer be in doubt? The same polls that say Americans love Jews also say that Americans are queasy about Muslims, who score the lowest of all religious groups in all the surveys noted earlier. While Jews can put a synagogue wherever they want, Muslims are forced to engage in sophisticated public relations battles in communities across the country if they want to build a mosque. If Chelsea had married a Muslim, what would the headlines and blogs have said? Any Jewish joy about being well-liked in America is dampened by the fact that Americans have found a new scapegoat. Nevertheless, American Jews would do well to accept the fact that American culture had definitively shifted away from the old stereotypes. Jews are no longer the Other. American Jews are not strangers in a strange land. Can Jewish identity survive being so well-liked? Some will cling to old narratives and say that philo-Semitism is just an advanced form of anti-Semitism -- a sophisticated strategy to kill Jews with kindness. They'll argue that without the threat of anti-Semitism, a central component of Jewish identity, Jews will slowly disappear. I, for one, believe American Jews will survive the transition to being well-liked in America. Like singing in a major key after centuries of singing in minor, it will feel weird at first but it will eventually become authentic. The 4.7 million people who listened to that Hanukkah song by the Maccabeats have a clue as to what major-key Judaism might feel like. The challenges of Judaism in a major key are great. Fundraising letters that claim the Jewish sky is falling in America must be re-written to attract younger Jews like me who throw such letters directly into the trash. Our educational approaches must shift by teaching young Jews that throughout Jewish history the world has often treated us with disdain and that there have been numerous exceptions to the rule, with 21st century America as the most prominent example. Most importantly, conceptions of Jewish identity that require a negative environment to thrive must give way to positive, more nuanced and complex conceptions of Jewish identity that can thrive in an environment of philo-Semitism. It is time for American Jews to see the everyday respect, kindness and fairness that Americans offer to Jews as a sign that Jews in America today are actually respected, well-liked and considered normal. And when we internalize that acceptance, we can do even more to help others who are not yet accepted in America. The Book of Esther mentions no Persian resistance to Haman's decree to destroy the Jews. Is there any doubt how Americans would react to a modern-day Haman's decree? This Purim, as Jews drown out Haman's name with shouts and groggers, let us thank God for our lot in America and commit to building and celebrating Jewish lives that can thrive even when we are loved. .