A Close Look at the Attitudes of American Jewish Students towards Israel

In the June 10 issue of the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart discussed several recent studies. They show that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders, with many professing a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, Beinart reports, the student senate at Brandeis, the only non-sectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

The surveys encountered some firm beliefs, the article states. First, the students reserve the right to question the Israeli position. They resist anything they see as “group think.” They want an open and frank discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, young Jews desperately want peace. Third, many empathize with the plight of the Palestinians. When shown ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined, Beinart says. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.

The obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young, Beinart writes. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood – a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967 – strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.

In theory, mainstream American Jewish organizations still hew to a liberal vision of Zionism, Beinart writes. But the students feel that by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire.

Peter Beinart’s description of the attitudes of American students may very well also apply to Canadian students.