It now appears, well, at least to me, that Peter Beinart's odyssey from his family's Betar/Revisionist roots to anti-Zionism is reaching full expression. Seemingly self-delighted with his outrageous opinions and more invidious action-suggestions of boycott (supposedly selective but he forgets that not all who read him are as smart as he thinks he is), he now has published a call with the message thatInstead of helping left- and right-wing American Jews talk to each other about Israel, let’s help them find a common Jewish identity beyond Israel.
He acknowledges that he is treated with disdain in some quarters. Nevertheless, he has friends amongst these people and what sustains their relationships is --- studying Judaism. Israel is too contentious a subject and among the bonds of communal connection that Jews share, Israel is but one of them, the others being "a shared memory of oppression" even though "the sense of exclusion that once forged solidarity among American Jews weakens" as the memory of the Holocaust fades (tell that, Peter, to Nashville), "Jewish culture" (his example is the bialy) and the third is “tikkun olam” (which in his extreme secular liberal/progressivism means (the idea that Jews bear a special responsibility to the strangers in our midst [but "in our midst" originally meant within the Land of Israel but we know Beinart's perversions of Jewish history, religion and culture, don't we?]).As for history, he falsely claims that "the Holocaust created an American Jewish consensus in support of the Jewish State". Not quite. The extermination of 6 million Jews only suppressed the political ideology that Binart now seeks to, pardon the cross-religious literacy, resurrect.Prior to World War Two, the dominant approaches to Zionism, in America and other locations of Exile, were philanthropic endeavors without political or nationalist commitment, Magnes/Wise-style ambivalence-cum-opposition to Zionism's goal of statehood and, of course, anti-Zionism, whether that of the American Council for Judaism or Naturei-Kartism then led by Chaim Elazar Shapira of Munkatch and his growing community of expatriates in America.Beinart, I assert, is finally dislocating himself from one of the most central aspects of Judaism: living in and settling the Land. His new mitza is 'identification' which is nothing more. actually, than 'acknowledgement' mainly because Israel bothers him and interferes with his galutlife and future therein.