What Do Progressive Jews and Zionist Democrats Tell Us About the Israel-Israel Interaction? — A Conversation with Sine Analogue Matan Arad-Neeman

While the group sang a call-and-response of “cease-fire now” and “not in our name” next to the Reflecting Pool, Matan Arad-Neeman, the group’s spokesman, explained why they were there.

17 members of congress have already called for a cease-fire. He said that he was grateful for their moral courage. “But the rest of Congress should do more to end this bloodshed.”

The dilemmas of progressive Jews and Zionist Democrats. If the pressures on European elites come from multiple directions, the pressures on American Jews and Zionists inside the Democratic coalition push just one way: toward the right. There is a lot of trouble for progressive Jews who thought of themselves as pro-peace, pro-Palestine and anti-Likud when asked to condemn Hamas. Zionist liberals who are closer to the political center can take comfort that their worldview is still shared by most of the Democratic Party’s politicians, including the Democratic president. The leftward push in Democratic politics has been very effective, and it’s possible that progressives will get a chance to change the party’s image before long. Where will the Zionist Democrats go if they don’t go towards actual conservatism?

Stephen Walt from the Harvard’s Kennedy School said that the United States gave Israel generous support in the 1970s.

The relationship between the American leaders of the two parties has remained special since then. Proponents believe a strong democratic ally in the Middle East is important.

Walt — co-author of the controversial book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which was criticized for its views on U.S.-Israel ties — also points to domestic influence from pro-Israel groups as a factor in the alliance. Most notable among those groups is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and Walt says that the influence is asymmetrical.

“There’s hardly any countervailing forces on the other side,” he said. There are a lot of pro-Palestinian groups, but they’re not as influential as they could be.

For one thing, the behavior of Israeli leaders can push away American voters — like the friction between Israel’s conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-President Barack Obama.

In addition, Israel has had right-leaning prime ministers for much of the last 30 years; the country’s rightward shift, Walt said, has likely made some Democrats less willing to support the country.

“These are the youngsters on campus who are protesting against the war,” said Osamah Khalil, professor of history at Syracuse University. Some of them begin to wonder if the US is seeing the same dynamics in Israel’s role in the Middle East.

That view does not represent progressives as a whole. Mellman thinks the left needs to be better educated if there is an ideological split.

Many critics of Israel wrongly think that the victims and oppressors of Israel are Hamas and the people of Gaza.

Many young progressives see Israel’s longstanding treatment of Palestinians as a form of systemic oppression, and they understand the situation, according to Syracuse history professor Khalil. He adds that it’s a lens through which progressives already see many domestic issues.

Black Lives Matter’s support for pro-Palestinian causes has inspired some progressives to draw parallels to their own.

There are voices in the so-called progressive movement, but they still make up a very small part of the party.

American-Israel War, Progressivism, and a New Variation of Neoconservatism: A New Perspective on the Diaspora

He said many young people have seen decades of the US and Israeli policy of just maintaining the system of apartheid fail. I’m Israeli-American, and it hasn’t kept my family safer.

President Biden has continued to walk a fine line on the conflict, saying Israel has the right to defend itself, but also pushing for more aid for the Palestinians, and for Israel to protect civilians.

Progressivism has been radicalized. Western progressivism has a more radical line about Israel now than in the past because of Israel’s own rightward shift in that same time. The extent to which the rhetoric of decolonization extends from cultural and psychological projects to support for armed struggle and antisemitic terror still feels like a revelation of radical.

The recent protests in European capitals, especially, are less an extension of a radicalized progressivism than a straightforward expression of ethnic and religious solidarity with the Palestinians on the part of Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendants. A tacit alliance between this diaspora and a secular, feminist, gay-affirming Western progressivism raises big questions for both progressives and conservative Muslims.

A British writer recently noticed that commentary in Britain now seemed to be a little more sympathetic to Israel than the commentary in the US.

A re-enactment of neoconservatism. One thing that liberal supporters of Israel will find if they move rightward, indeed a thing that some are already helping to create, is a new variation on neoconservatism. This is a different version of the George W. Bush-era version, with its bestriding confidence in American power and its grand strategy. It is an inchoate alliance against progressivism. Many members of the group still feel uncomfortable belonging to the left of center coalition, but they’re more disconnected from progressivism now than they were before. This makes it a movement more like 1970s-era neoconservatism — a mugged-by-reality halfway house for intellectuals unhappy with their options but trending clearly to the right.