Ezra Klein Peddles Old Progressive Disdain for Israel as New Progressive Jews once agonized over Israel’s survival—now many condemn its existence, mistaking provincial ideology for principled liberalism.By Peter Berkowitz
https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/05/ezra-klein-peddles-old-progressive-disdain-for-israel-as-new/
As in 2003, so too in 2025: The illiberal imagination nourishes progressive disdain for Israel.
Since 1897, when Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Jews have divided over the significance of a Jewish nation-state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. Seldom, however, have American progressive Jews shown so little sympathy for the challenges that Israel faces as they have in the 21st century or delivered themselves of such illiberal judgments in condemning Israel as they have in the aftermath of Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacres.
In Oct. 2003, amid the Second Intifada’s carnage, the late New York University history professor Tony Judt proclaimed in The New York Review of Books the death of “the Middle East peace process.” The then-common phrase referring to efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict was highly misleading because the parties’ combined population – Israel, along with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians – totaled around 10 million, while the Middle East’s Muslim population stood at approximately 270 million. Not only did the conflict directly involve less than 4% of the Middle East’s population, but it also revolved around a contested sliver of territory that represented less than 0.5% of the land over which Arab states and Iran exercised sovereignty.
Identifying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the principal source of instability and violence in the Middle East casts doubt on Israel’s legitimacy as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
So does assigning Israel the lion’s share of the blame for the conflict. This Judt also did in “Israel: The Alternative.”
His New York Review of Books essay barely alluded to the Second Intifada, which erupted in fall 2000, a few months after then-Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat stormed out of Camp David negotiations over a Palestinian state. Over the next five years, Palestinians conducted more than 130 suicide-bombing attacks on primarily civilian targets in Israel, killing more than 1,000 and wounding more than 8,000. Furthermore, Judt understated the jihadists’ ideological hatred. He said nothing about the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. And he ignored the Palestinian insistence on a “right of return,” a right without foundation in international law that would allow the then-approximately 4 million descendants of some 700,000 Palestinian refugees from Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence to take up residence in Israel and turn it into a Muslim-majority state.
Instead of considering the Palestinian threats that made Israelis wary of the establishment of a Palestinian state, Judt dwelled on Israeli actions, real and imagined, that thwarted peace. In Judea and Samaria, he lamented, Israel built illegal settlements and grabbed land. That framing was debatable. He also affirmed the then-common canard that Israel under right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon impelled the Bush administration “to destabilize and then reconfigure the Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel.” But if Israel were calling the shots in 2003, the United States would have targeted Iran and not Iraq, since by the late 1990s, Israel had identified Iran and not Iraq as its major strategic threat.
Judt’s invidious fantasy that Israel dictated U.S. foreign policy fueled his conviction that Israel’s lurch to the right represented a multi-dimensional calamity: “The depressing truth is that Israel’s current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is,” he wrote. “It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.”
Israel must change, Judt maintained, not only for its sake but also for the sake of Jews everywhere – not least for New York Jews who frequented the city’s fashionable cocktail receptions, attended its exclusive dinner parties, and wrote highbrow criticism for its upscale publications: “In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism.”
In a world in which morality and good taste demanded progressive cosmopolitan sensibilities, argued Judt, Israel was obliged to transform itself from the nation-state of the Jewish people that was home to an Arab minority into a binational state granting citizenship to West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. “To convert Israel from a Jewish state into a binational one would not be easy,” Judt acknowledged. But he did not inform readers that the binational state he envisaged would be something that the Middle East had never known: a Muslim majority or near-majority state that governed itself democratically and recognized and secured non-Muslims’ rights or, for that matter, Muslims’ rights.
Given Judt’s high-profile essay from 2003 and the career that progressive journalist Peter Beinart has since made of sharing promiscuously how Israel has betrayed his liberal and Jewish conscience, it is startling to hear from New York Times columnist Ezra Klein that “The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down.” It’s not that Klein is wrong. In “Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another,” he rightly observes that American Jews don’t agree on propositions that once united most of them: “What is good for Israel is good for the Jews. Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. And there will, someday soon, be a two-state solution that reconciles Zionism and liberalism.”
It’s that Klein is off by at least a generation in identifying the consensus’s breakdown.
Off, too, is Klein’s account of the breakdown’s sources. Like Judt, in whose two-decades-old footsteps he unknowingly follows, Klein reports sympathetically the opinions of progressives appalled by Israel, while misreporting, or not reporting at all, the views of Israel’s conservative supporters. Like Judt, Klein understates – when he doesn’t ignore – Israel’s national-security challenges: For example, he alludes to Israel’s extraordinary military operation against the Islamic Republic of Iran in June but overlooks that by virtue of Tehran’s determination to rebuild its nuclear program, replenish its stock of ballistic missiles, and persist in funding Islamist proxies throughout the region, Iran still poses an existential threat to the Jewish state. And like Judt, Klein obscures the blend of principles that informs modern Zionism.
Klein sees in the conflicting reactions to Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor the defining fault line in Jewish opinions about Israel. “Many older Jews, whom Klein knows, “are shocked and scared by Mamdani’s victory.” They view Israel as “the world’s only reliable refuge for the Jewish people” and “see opposition to Israel as a cloak for antisemitism.” For them, “Mamdani is a harbinger” of a rising tide of hostility in America to Israel and the Jews. Meanwhile, “[m]any younger Jews” whom Klein knows “voted for Mamdani” and “are not afraid of him.” They “fear” that Israel is fast becoming “an apartheid state ruling over ruins in Gaza and Bantustans in the West Bank.” These progressive Jews “fear what that means for anti-Jewish violence all over the world” and “fear what that will do – what it has already done – to the meaning of Jewishness.” The “commitment to the basic ideals of liberalism” for these progressive Jews “is stronger than their commitment to what Israel has become.”
Unfortunately, they, Klein, and Mamdani confuse illiberal one-sidedness for liberalism.
Klein maintains that Mamdani’s anti-Zionism, like that of progressive Jews, flows from liberalism: They object not to Jews but to Israel’s Jewishness. “For Jews of the diaspora, multiethnic democracy – in which the rights and security of political minorities are protected – is the bedrock on which our safety is built,” writes Klein. “For Jews of Israel, a Jewish majority is the bedrock upon which their state is built.” Why this does not lead Mamdani, Klein, and younger Jews to object to the Muslim states that surround Israel, Klein does not say.
In any case, Israel’s bedrock is more layered and complex than Klein, progressive Jews, and Mamdani grasp. It’s true that Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence proclaims a Jewish state. In contrast to neighboring Muslim countries, the Declaration also announces Israel’s obligation to protect citizens’ equal basic rights. And it affirms Israel’s democratic character by committing the nation’s Jewish majority – amid a war of annihilation launched by five Arab states – to work with “the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel” to build the country “on the basis of full and equal citizenship.”
Harsh circumstances challenge the Israeli synthesis. But Klein falsely maintains that the approximately two million Arab citizens of Israel (many of whom identify as Palestinian) are “by any measure, second-class citizens.” That’s wrong. Israel must work to improve the economic well-being and participation in civic life of its Arab minority. However, sharing formal basic rights with fellow Israelis, all non-Jewish citizens of the Jewish state are, from the liberal perspective Klein supposedly embraces, full and equal citizens.
Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people and a multi-religious and multi-ethnic rights-protecting democracy defending itself against jihadists seeking to destroy it. While New York City is a metropolis of many wonders, it takes a provincialism of a high order to insist that New York’s progressive cosmopolitanism is the standard by which Israel must be measured and found wanting.
As in 2003, so too in 2025: The illiberal imagination nourishes progressive disdain for Israel.
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