The meme of the ‘disaffected Jew’ has been greatly exaggerated

By Ted Lapkin

Like Mark Twain’s famous quip about reports of his death being “greatly exaggerated”, assertions of a weakening in Jewish affection for Israel are grossly overstated. In fact, they’re patently false.

But that hasn’t stopped American Jewish writer Peter Beinart from making a minor career out of advancing that thesis.

A year ago he generated worldwide headlines with an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”. And since then Beinart has trotted the globe, peddling his argument at such venues as the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Beinart believes that traditional Zionism is in a moral “downward spiral” that alienates Israel from liberal-minded American Jews. And he claims this phenomenon is particularly acute amongst the young, who increasingly see Israel as victimiser rather than victim.

The ‘disaffected Jew’ meme also popped up last year in the pages of the Leftwing NewMatilda magazine. “The Jewish Disaspora is Turning on Israel”, proclaimed the headline of an article by Antony Loewenstein, John Docker and Ned Curthoys.

But the recent publication of two academic research surveys has cast the theory of Jewish detachment from Israel into serious intellectual disrepute. The American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) 2010 Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion found that 74 per cent of American Jews felt “fairly close” or “very close” to Israel. This figure is entirely consistent with the findings of previous surveys done over the past decade.

The AJC survey also found that a whopping 94 per cent thought that any formal peace treaty with the Palestinians must include formal recognition of Israel’s Jewish character. A solid majority of 62 per cent also expressed support for the idea of Israeli military action to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

These results were largely reaffirmed by an August 2010 Brandeis University survey entitled Still Connected: American Jewish Attitudes Towards Israel. The study found that 75 per cent of those polled felt affection for Israel is an important part of their Jewish identity.

Brandeis pollsters also focused in the May-June 2010 Gaza flotilla incident as microcosm of larger Jewish patterns of sentiment and affiliation. They found 70 per cent of Jews endorsed Israeli’s actions during last year’s Gaza flotilla incident, versus only 9 per cent who supported the pro-Palestinian cause.

Even more surprising was the finding that younger American Jews were more hawkish in their support for Israel than their older ethnic kin. Fully 58 per cent of the 18-to-29 age bracket opposed Israeli territorial concessions in Jerusalem, compared to only 43 per cent of 45 to 59 year-old Jews.

More remarkable still was the lack of impact political ideology had on affinity for Zionism. Fully 82 per cent of Left-leaning American Jews thought that current levels of US support for Israel should be maintained or increased, with a mere 18 per cent wanting them cut.

And it’s not just Jews in the United States. In their 2004 study of Australian Jewish political sentiment, Professors Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Phillip Mendes found extremely high levels of affection for Israel. They wrote: “on almost every available measure – visitation, resident relatives, emotional attachment and philanthropy – Israel figures centrally in Australian Jewish identity.”

The more extreme version of the Jewish disaffection thesis peddled by Loewenstein, Docker and Curthoys is relatively easy to dismiss. After all, these are self-avowed enemies of Zionism who oppose a Jewish state both in concept and reality. And as we have observed, their argument flies in the face of objective polling reality.

But Peter Beinart comes at this issue from a much more nuanced direction. Far from being a foe of Israel, he claims to be its truest friend. In the political equivalent of an addiction intervention, Beinart wants to save “liberal Zionism in Israel.” This, he declares, “is the great American Jewish challenge of our age”.

Never mind that even dovish-minded Israelis tend to be annoyed by such cloyingly sententious pronouncements from afar. After all, if the world according to Beinart doesn’t work out as expected, he’ll be watching events from his New York living room on his flat screen TV. He won’t be the one putting on his uniform and reporting for army reserve duty.

Beinart’s self-appointed mission to civilise Zionism is just a modern manifestation of the Left man’s burden. In a Kipling-esque exercise of patronising paternalism, he’s saying that he knows better than the Israelis what’s good for Israel. If the ultimate object of Beinart’s exercise is to influence Israeli policy, he won’t get there by alienating his potential allies through such remote-control pontification.

Since the 1967 war, it is undeniable that Left-of-centre opinion has moved away from support for Israel towards empathy with mortal enemies of the Jewish state. This is most pronounced amongst radical academics and rent-a-mob protestors who march arm and arm with Hezbollah supporters in street demonstrations.

But these currents have also taken their toll within the more moderate currents of the centre-Left. And as a result, support for Israel is far less pronounced these days amongst progressives than it is amongst conservatives.

Beinart attributes that erosion to Israel’s abandonment of its original sublime ideals. He claims that it isn’t he who left Zionism, but that Zionism left him.

But the true act of defection has been on the part of Western progressives who have cast by the wayside the only full-fledged democracy in the otherwise benighted Middle East.

The tragedy of Jewish progressives like Peter Beinart is that their people and their principles have never truly been in conflict. The only real contradiction is between Zionism and a Left-wing worldview gone mad, and on that question Beinart chose wrongly.

Ted Lapkin is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Affairs. He worked as a ministerial advisor to the federal Coalition and as communications director to a senior member of the Republican leadership in the US Congress.