Thousands of miles away, Americans who identify with Israel and its debates about settlements still don't have quite the same dilemma. Americans don't have to make daily choices about, for instance, which road to take to Jerusalem (use Route 443 through the territories or not?), or whether to move to cheaper and more spacious settler housing, where roads and services are better subsidized. It might seem like a no-brainer to make the principled and relatively hassle-free decision to avoid settlement products. Settlement growth, after all, is bad for Israel's security, its long-term feasibility as a democracy, and its prospects for a two-state outcome. Peter Beinart makes this a particularly user-friendly gesture for any Zionist-of-conscience, calling it "Zionist BDS." (BDS is short for boycott, divestment, and sanctions.) He excludes East Jerusalem from the boycott (on unconvincing grounds), and rallies the settlement boycotters to pursue "an equally vigorous embrace of democratic Israel," taking every cent that doesn't go to the settlements and investing it in non-settlement Israel.

It's not exactly a radical proposal. So why have not only the Jewish right, but also so many self-defining mainstream Zionists, responded with such condemnation and vilification? Jewish establishment organizations, all of whom claim to support a two-state solution -- the Jewish Federations of North America, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee -- have all come out against Beinart and his proposal.

It's a point of consensus among pragmatists that settlements are a (even if not the) major obstacle to a two-state outcome, and one that Israel has total control over. One in ten Jewish Israelis resides in a settlement; one in five residents of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are Israeli settlers. It shouldn't be controversial to say that these settlements make a two-state outcome more difficult and less likely.

A settlement boycott as Beinart proposed could do two things: stake out a principled position that says we don't support settlements, and further a larger political effort to change policy in the U.S. and Israel. Beinart is trying to plant a liberal Zionist flag, asserting that democratic Israel is worth saving, and that it can be saved. Yet the supposedly liberal Zionist, pro-democracy establishment seems determined to prove that no such flag can be planted, and that their liberal Zionism rests on quicksand. Israeli policies are constantly blurring the green line (the old armistice line now separating Israel from the occupied Palestinian territories) and eroding Israeli democracy in increasingly profound ways. Beinart has challenged American Jews to take a stand against this self-destruction -- but their institutional establishment leadership (groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Federations) have impolitely declined. J Street also did not support the boycott call. But J Street has a theory of change that is all about taking Washington DC and Congressional politics out of its own comfort zone -- an approach distinctly unpopular with these American Jewish groups.