ELECTIONS are to special-interest groups what spinach is to Popeye. So it was no surprise that the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) at the beginning of this month produced the usual pandering. Barack Obama, Arab-Israeli peacemaking on hold, said that when the chips were down “I have Israel's back”. When Mitt Romney's video address began, one wicked tweet wondered whether the Republican candidate would promise to make his inauguration speech from Jerusalem. In the event, he promised only to make Jerusalem his first port of call as president.

In recent years, however, mighty AIPAC has had to cope with an irritant: a small but dogged competitor. On March 24th a different group of American Jews will meet in downtown Washington at the conference of the organisation known as J Street. J Street is growing, though still a tiddler by AIPAC standards. It now has 50-odd staffers, and has lined up Ehud Olmert, Israel's former prime minister, as next week's keynote speaker.

The J Streeters are peaceniks, always banging on about the two-state solution. AIPAC says it is neutral in Israeli politics, but is closer to Israel's Likud. J Streeters fret about the stateless Palestinians and the damage Israel's occupation of the West Bank does to its soul. The question at AIPAC is when Mr Obama will send his bombers to squish Iran's nuclear ambitions. At first glance, this looks like a quarrel about foreign policy. But what if something else is at stake: the future of American Jewry itself?

Enter Peter Beinart, a political scientist and former editor of the liberal (and pro-Israel) weekly, the New Republic. At J Street next week he will launch a book, “The Crisis of Zionism” (Times Books), which has already sent plenty of people into a spin.

That is because, though a passionate Zionist, Mr Beinart wants Israel to save its democracy by leaving the West Bank. He therefore calls in the book—and, provocatively, in an op-ed in the New York Times—for American Jews to start calling the West Bank “non-democratic Israel” and to push for a boycott of the settlements there. By doing so, he argues, American Jews who support Israel but not the occupation would clarify a vital distinction.

This, frankly, is an idea J Street needs like a hole in the head. The fledgling organisation already finds it hard enough to convince would-be supporters that it is a genuine friend of Israel. Its cautious founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has been quick to distance himself, and Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has been quick to pounce. The ambassador dismissed Mr Beinart on Facebook as “well beyond the Israeli mainstream”.

Yet if the boycott is not the shrewdest of ideas, the book is by no means bad. Though a bit too blithe about Arab intentions towards Israel, the interesting part of it is not what it says about the Middle East. It is the part about what their affair with Israel has done to American Jews.

Mr Beinart points out that few other Jews have made liberalism such a central part of their identity. For close to a century, American Jews have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. In 2004, when asked what best defined their Jewish identity, as many chose “social justice” as chose “religious observance” and “support for Israel” combined. In 2008 they voted for Mr Obama at twice the rate of white Christians. So how, wonders Mr Beinart, did a Jewish community famed for its liberalism come to create a leadership so reluctant to defend democracy in the Jewish state?

His answer is that today's Jewish establishment did not spring from American Jewish liberalism, but was a reaction against it.

The argument goes like this. After Israel's victory in the six-day war of 1967, Zionism in America reached a fever pitch. But in the 1970s Israel came to be seen by many around the world, and by chunks of the American left, as a bully. To correct this, some of the community's leaders came to believe that they had to remind fellow Jews and the world that Jews were victims. Victimhood, coupled with a new emphasis on the Holocaust, displaced liberalism as the “defining ideology of organised Jewish life”.

Liberalism out, tribalism in

This, at any rate, was the direction in which the organised Jewish establishment moved. But most American Jews, especially younger Jews, did not. Feeling less embattled, many have transferred their liberal energies from specifically Jewish organisations to the likes of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organisation for Women. On Israel and many other issues, American Jews are well to the left of organisations, such as AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Jewish organisations, that claim to represent them. Unhappily, says Mr Beinart, that does not matter, because the organisations are sustained by a small number of rich donors and not accountable to the community.

To Mr Beinart, this is a tragedy. Fine Jewish organisations like the Anti-Defamation League, torn between their founding liberalism and the new code of Israel right-or-wrong, have lost their way. Mr Obama, a champion of the liberal Zionism he picked up from Jewish friends and mentors in Chicago and Harvard, is calumniated as Israel's enemy. Many young American Jews are marrying out, while others are turning away in alienation from Zionism and so ceding control of Jewish organisations to an Orthodox minority less committed to Israeli democracy.

Mr Beinart thinks America's Jews must redeem both themselves and Israel by rededicating themselves to Israel's ethical character: “They must see their own honour as bound up with the honour of the Jewish state.” Contrary to what Mr Oren says, many Israelis, scared as they are of Hizbullah's missiles and Iran's looming bomb, feel just the same. No doubt Mr Beinart will be written off as a self-appointed Isaiah with a book to sell. But the sentiment is noble, and the message deserves to be heard.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington