Peaced out: Peter Beinart warns that American Jews must refocus on the democratic and humanitarian principles of Zionism before Israel becomes simply another despotic Middle Eastern state.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: The Crisis of Zionism - Book review

The Crisis of Zionism

by Peter Beinart

Times Books, 304 pp.

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Of all the difficult allies whom Barack Obama has had to contend with during his presidency--the thin-skinned and erratic Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, the secretive and possibly duplicitous Pakistani general and de facto ruler, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani--perhaps none has given the president more headaches than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The pair's distaste for and distrust of each other was evident from the start: Netanyahu, whose inner circle contemptuously referred to the U.S. president as Barack "Hussein" Obama, regarded him as flagrantly pro-Palestinian, and recklessly dismissive of Israel's security concerns. Obama, in turn, saw the Likud leader as an unyielding ideologue whose goal is permanent occupation of much of the West Bank and who has used every method available to him, open and devious, to make negotiations with his Palestinian adversaries impossible.

As Peter Beinart makes clear in his passionately argued and persuasive new book, The Crisis of Zionism, Netanyahu managed swiftly to gain the upper hand in the relationship--in no small part thanks to the political support he received from right-wing U.S. Jewish lobbying groups. The alliance between these organizations and the most revanchist elements of the Israeli leadership--those dedicated to expanding control over the West Bank and preventing the creation of a viable Palestinian state--represents, to Beinart, a betrayal of the democratic and humanitarian principles upon which Zionism, and especially American Zionism, was based. His book is one part analysis of how that betrayal came to pass, and one part a rallying cry for a more responsible, and ethical, approach to both the Palestinian question and the U.S.-Israeli relationship. "Unless American Jews help end the occupation that desecrates Israel's founding ideals," he writes at the outset of this eloquent polemic, which is certain to place him at the top of the enemies list of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Zionism will become "a movement that fails the test of Jewish power."

Beinart's book is the second major work in recent months to sound the alarm about the entrenchment of what he calls "non-democratic" Israel across the green line. In The Unmaking of Israel, liberal American-Israeli journalist (and orthodox Jew) Gershom Gorenberg argued that Israel had in effect created an apartheid state in...