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.