There has been more pushback against Netanyahu from Jewish Democrats. Barney Frank and Henry Waxman are appalled by his intervention in our political process.

Netanyahu’s error was exposing American Jews to a dual loyalty charge. American Jews don’t want that suspicion; but Netanyahu’s appeals to Jewish voters created it.

There is a fascinating piece up at The Nation in which Norman Birnbaum, sociologist and Georgetown University prof emeritus, accuses Netanyahu of recklessness in exposing American Jews to such charges. Birnbaum lays out the basis for the concern: Zionism is a transnational ideology, dependent on a foreign power, and therefore on Diaspora Jews. And though Birnbaum is obviously troubled by the Israel lobby’s role in U.S. politics, he chooses his words carefully, as if people are about to be accused. He says the lobby is hardly representative of American Jewry; it calls on the most “ethnocentric” of Jews. He says that Protestants are a “pillar” of the lobby, but also that Protestants are about to walk away.

The exciting bits are at the end of my excerpts. First, Birnbaum’s biopsy of American Jewish attitudes:



Unconditional support for Israel among American Jews is a substitute for the faith of our fathers. Generally, that support is strongest among those who live in a predominantly Jewish milieu. Those who are out and about in American society tend to have more differentiated views…. That debate has moved from the margins to near the center of American Jewish consciousness. The fervid supporters of Israel continue to embarrass the rest of us, as in the attempt to ban criticism of Israel in our colleges and universities as ipso facto “anti-Semitic.” Opinion polling, and every other sort of inquiry, suggest that a majority of American Jews are so rooted in this country that Israel’s fate does not determine or dominate their entire being, including their politics…. Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban, among others, have certainly bought attention by throwing their money around, but no amount of money can erase the grossness of their ethnocentrism… Groups and individuals espousing critical views of Israel’s policies have always been part of the American Jewish landscape. In Israel’s early years, the American Jewish Committee and any number of publicists, rabbis and scholars insisted that their primary loyalty was to the United States, and they warned the Israelis not to seek total support from American Jewry or to interfere in American affairs. At present, J Street is the most audible of American Jewish groups critical of Israel’s policies, but it limps behind events. It espouses a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, a solution that is blocked by Jewish settlements. Indeed, few in the Jewish community are prepared to acknowledge the obvious: Unless some hundreds of thousands of Jewish inhabitants of Palestine move back to Israel, the two peoples, Arab and Jewish, will remain joined—but not forever. ….Even some of the more critical American Jewish supporters of Israel are reluctant to examine these problematic aspects of Israel’s future. …The leaders of the American Jewish organizations understand American public life as a system of group bargaining. What will they do when more and more of their gentile interlocutors (a movement already well advanced in some of the mainline Protestant churches) declare that American values require criticism of Israel? No amount of funding of not exceptionally gifted legislators (think of Senators Jon Kyl and Mark Kirk) can replace dealing with fundamental conflicts of political value. …. Uncritical support for Israel among the more ethnocentric segments of the Jewish community and among the most culturally closed groups in gentile America is no compensation for the increasing readiness of much of American Protestantism to take its distance.

Now here’s his analysis of how Netanyahu has exposed the Jewish community in ways that it will find extremely uncomfortable. He’s too careful here; but he knows that Americans who have had their careers destroyed for criticizing Israel are angry about it, and he believes they might have the last word. Note his acknowledgment that the Israel lobby has been guilty of dual loyalty, and his warning to Jews about avoiding that trap. “It ill becomes us to devalue [our contributions to American life] by assigning priority to agreement with Israel’s agenda, formed in a society not ours.”