Editor’s Note: An earlier version of the article below appeared in our May 2 print issue. Subscribers can download the PDF.
 
From the moment the Goldstone Report was published in September 2009, its opponents have worked tirelessly to undermine it. The 452-page investigation of the 2008–09 Gaza conflict by a United Nations Human Rights Council fact-finding mission accused Israel and Hamas of war crimes for attacks on civilians, but its overall thrust was harshly critical of the Israeli onslaught, which took as many as 1,400 Palestinian lives, including those of more than 300 children. The US Congress denounced the report for allegedly denying Israel’s right of self-defense (it didn’t); Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortlisted the report, along with Hamas rockets and a nuclear-armed Iran, as one of the three main threats to the Jewish state; and Alan Dershowitz accused the report’s chief author, Richard Goldstone, of being a traitor to the Jewish people. As recently as March, Eli Yishai, Israel’s bellicose interior minister, wrote to Goldstone charging his report with giving “legitimacy” to terrorist organizations and “calm[ing] murderers without a conscience” when they murder children.

Then came the “reconsideration.” On April 1 Goldstone, a 72-year-old South African judge, published an op-ed in the Washington Post saying that Israeli army investigations of some 400 incidents during Operation Cast Lead had caused him to disavow a key assertion in the report: that Israel had a policy of deliberate attacks on civilians during the twenty-two-day conflict. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” he wrote.

Within hours of Goldstone’s op-ed, those who had been gunning for the report all along gleefully pronounced its demise. They characterized the judge’s essay as a recantation, and they declared the report mortally flawed. Netanyahu demanded that the UN cancel the document. The State Department followed suit, with UN ambassador Susan Rice stating that she wanted the report simply to “disappear.” The Israel Action Network, a multi-million-dollar effort led by the Jewish Federations of North America to massage Israel’s image and rebut “delegitimization” efforts, promptly launched a campaign to circulate the op-ed to as many “opinion molders” as possible.

And yet, the Goldstone Report lives on. Not only have all efforts to derail it failed thus far but the report is arguably more relevant than ever. Just a few days before the judge’s “reconsideration,” the UN Human Rights Council gave the report new life by passing a resolution recommending that it be sent to the General Assembly and from there to the Security Council for possible referral to the International Criminal Court. And Goldstone’s op-ed itself has thrust the report, and its recommendations, back into the spotlight. “In my view, the Goldstone retreat, unfortunate for his overall reputation and legacy, has actually given the report, and its recommendation, a second public life, with renewed interest, and civil society engagement with a call for its implementation,” Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, wrote in an e-mail. He later added, “It has made people more aware about the need for accountability.”

Eminent figures have stepped up to affirm the validity of the original document, including, most notably, the three commissioners who co-authored the report with Goldstone: retired Irish colonel Desmond Travers, Pakistani lawyer Hina Jilani, and legal scholar Christine Chinkin. In a devastating rebuke published in the Guardian on April 14, the three commissioners defended the validity of the report and dismissed critics who have sought to capitalize on Goldstone’s essay as cynically misrepresenting the facts.

“We concur in our view that there is no justification for any demand or expectation for reconsideration of the report as nothing of substance has appeared that would in any way change the context, findings or conclusions of that report with respect to any of the parties to the Gaza conflict,” they wrote in their statement. Further down they added, “Had we given in to pressures from any quarter to sanitize our conclusions, we would be doing a serious injustice to the hundreds of innocent civilians killed during the Gaza conflict, the thousands injured, and the hundreds of thousands whose lives continue to be deeply affected by the conflict and the blockade.”

Indeed, the largest lesson of the controversy has been that the world is not prepared to forget these hundreds of thousands of killed, injured and “deeply affected” civilians – or the report that documented their suffering. If Gaza was a contemporary Guernica, the report fit the battle by describing riveting horrors: the children forced to sleep next to their parents’ bodies for days on end as ambulances were denied access to neighborhoods; the 15-year-old boy whose mother sought to save him by sewing up the bullet hole in his chest with a needle sterilized in cologne; the mother and daughter, 65 and 37, shot and killed amid a crowd of civilians carrying white flags as they walked from a village in search of safe harbor; the student who calmly told Human Rights Council interviewers, “My legs were exploded away” by a shell that killed several members of his family. These images will haunt anyone who has read the report.

No less powerful is the moral vocabulary the report provided to describe the outrage of these events. This language was drawn from the realm of international law and carried the promise of legal repercussions for the wrongs committed—by Israel and Hamas—during Cast Lead. Thanks to the report there were names, and consequences, for the suffering inflicted on the people of Gaza, as well as the people of southern Israel. The attack on Gaza’s only functioning flour mill became an example of Israel’s intentional destruction of the area’s civilian infrastructure, while the siege of Gaza, which deprived civilians of the means of sustenance, was correctly classified as a form of collective punishment. Both are war crimes, and both require criminal prosecution of those who planned and orchestrated them.

This moral vocabulary has now permeated the global discourse about Israel-Palestine. Israel’s apparent impunity has galvanized the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and inspired grassroots efforts to use universal jurisdiction to hold Israeli leaders accountable where the international community has failed to do so. This too is the achievement of the report: it has retold the story of the Israel-Palestine conflict and reshaped the contours of the debate.

There has been wide speculation on why Goldstone issued his “reconsideration.” Many have pointed to the unrelenting pressure on him—the ad hominem attacks, the accusations that he abetted terrorists, the meeting with members of the South African Jewish community that was designed to “puncture” his heart, according to the Forward. But the judge has offered no window on his motivation. Indeed, his reconsideration becomes all the more perplexing in light of his assertion that he still stands by the original report. “As presently advised I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time,” he told an AP reporter several days after his essay exploded across the Internet.

Equally confounding is the matter of the new “evidence” Goldstone adduces in his op-ed to suggest that Israel did not intentionally target civilians, evidence which his co-commissioners as well as legal experts say does not hold up under even the mildest examination.

Goldstone’s reconsideration hinges on his claim that Israel’s investigations into some of the most serious alleged crimes of Cast Lead have yielded new information that exonerates it of the charge that it targeted civilians as a matter of policy. To bolster this argument, he cites a March report by a UN Committee of Independent Experts, chaired by former New York Supreme Court justice Mary McGowan Davis which he says “recognized” the validity of Israel’s investigations. And yet, the committee makes no such claim. While commending Israel for initiating investigations, it offers a damning assessment of the quality of those inquiries. It points to Israel’s unwillingness, and structural inability, to investigate those who “designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead” as the greatest fault of the Israeli investigations to date.

As John Dugard, a former UN special rapporteur for the occupied territories and chair of a 2009 Arab League Independ-ent Fact Finding Committee on Gaza, wrote, “There are no new facts that exonerate Israel and that could possibly have led Goldstone to change his mind.” Dugard added that Goldstone’s op-ed misrepresented a key finding of the report when he said he no longer believed there was an intentional policy to target civilians. Such a policy was never the issue, Dugard points out; rather, it was Israel’s indiscriminate use of force that broke international law. “The principal accusation leveled at Israel,” he explains, “was that during its assault on Gaza, it used force indiscriminately in densely populated areas and was reckless about the foreseeable consequences of its actions, which resulted in at least 900 civilian deaths and 5,000 wounded.”

There can be no question that Goldstone’s op-ed has thrown up a considerable roadblock to those who hoped to see the report go to the International Criminal Court. “I was shocked and shattered,” said Norman Finkelstein, a longtime student of the conflict. “I immediately understood it was going to do terrible damage, and damage on many fronts. It’s the damage to truth and justice, it’s the damage to Jewish-Palestinian relations, it’s the damage to Israeli dissidents.”

Unfortunately, the willful misrepresentation continues. A bipartisan group of US senators has called for legislation urging the UN to rescind the report as a “libel” against Israel, while the State Department’s chief legal adviser has described the blocking of the Goldstone Report as an achievement right up there with setting up a UN commission to investigate Muammar el-Qaddafi’s human rights violations.

The report has survived more than eighteen months of assassination attempts, and it may weather the latest ones too. But if the attacks succeed, it will be a disaster for the principle of accountability in Israel and Palestine. As we write these words, tension is mounting once again between Israel and Hamas, and Israeli leaders like Tzipi Livni are threatening Gaza with a second Operation Cast Lead. Between April 7 and 11, nineteen Palestinians were killed and more than sixty injured. This fragile moment not only underscores the importance of the report and its central call—the need for accountability—but also the danger of ignoring its chief recommendations. As long as the crimes of Cast Lead go unpunished, we run the risk of seeing them repeated. Or as the Goldstone Report’s authors warn, “To deny modes of accountability reinforces impunity.”

In April the student senate at the University of California, Berkeley, twice held all-night sessions to debate a proposal urging the school to divest from two US military companies "materially and militarily profiting" from the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Hundreds of people packed the hall, and statements in support of the measure were read aloud from leaders, including Noam Chomsky, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Naomi Klein and Alice Walker. In the end the divestment measure failed (the senate majority of 13 to 5 was not enough to overturn the student government president's veto), but the outcome was surely less significant than the furor over the issue. Following related battles last year at Hampshire College and the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berkeley measure was yet another signal that the divestment initiative, part of a broader movement popularly known as BDS, for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, has become a key battleground in the grassroots struggle over the future of Israel/Palestine.

"We're at a super-exciting moment, truly a turning point," says Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace, an activist organization that supports selective divestment from companies profiting from the occupation. "For the first time we're seeing a serious debate of divestment at a major public university." BDS supporters say the movement has the potential to transform international opinion in much the way that the divestment movement in the 1980s isolated the South African apartheid regime. Or as Tutu wrote to the Berkeley students:

The same issue of equality is what motivates the divestment movement of today, which tries to end Israel's 43 year long occupation and the unequal treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them. The abuses they face are real, and no person should be offended by principled, morally consistent, nonviolent acts to oppose them. It is no more wrong to call out Israel in particular for its abuses than it was to call out the Apartheid regime in particular for its abuses.

Opponents of BDS see just that threat—that Israel will be isolated. They say that BDS unfairly singles out Israel for conduct that other states are also guilty of and that it seeks to delegitimize the Jewish state in the eyes of the world, thereby threatening Israel's existence. Some argue that grassroots actions put the emphasis on the wrong target. As Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center said on Democracy Now! in March, "It's the United States government you've got to look to, not private industry or private commerce. So that's one really big difference simply at strategic and tactical levels."

When did the BDS movement begin, why is it growing and what does it want?

The campaign traces its origins to a July 2004 advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice (the World Court), which found Israel's separation wall in the West Bank to be "contrary to international law." The ICJ also recommended that the parts of the wall built inside the occupied territories be dismantled and that Palestinians affected by the wall be compensated. When a year passed with no sign that the opinion would be enforced, a wide-ranging coalition of more than 170 organizations representing Palestinian civil society issued a call for boycott, divestment and sanction of Israel "until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights." Compliance meant three things: ending the occupation, recognizing equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel and respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194 of 1948.

The "call" (which can be found at bdsmovement.net) was notable for unifying the Palestinian grassroots and for the simplicity and coherence of its platform. BDS was seen as an "essential component" for shifting the playing field in the Palestinians' favor after the slow death of the peace process, the Israeli settlement expansion and the inability of the international community to hold Israel accountable.

Boycotts are not a new tactic for Palestinians. As far back as the 1936–39 revolt against the British Mandate, Palestinians incorporated general strikes and boycotts into their struggle. During the first intifada in the late 1980s, they boycotted Israeli goods, and the West Bank town of Beit Sahour led efforts to refuse to pay Israeli taxes that helped finance the occupation. And in 2001 an international boycott effort was launched after the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. It quickly met forceful pushback, notably in a 2002 charge by Harvard president Lawrence Summers that divestment was anti-Semitic "in effect, if not intent."

Today the BDS movement is loosely coordinated by a body called the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions Campaign National Committee (BNC), which is made up of nongovernmental organizations representing Palestinian civil society. The BNC is not affiliated with any political party (though it has been endorsed by some) and does not take positions on issues that fall outside the specific principles of the "call." Thus it does not endorse either a one-state or two-state solution to the conflict.

Israel's 2008–09 attack on Gaza spurred the campaign in the United States and around the world. "The most important thing for the Palestinian movement is the rise of the solidarity movement worldwide after the war crimes in Gaza," Palestinian activist and former Palestinian Authority presidential candidate Mustafa Barghouthi said earlier this year at a demonstration in the West Bank. "Boycott is the best way of changing the balance of forces. Military force will not work, because of the imbalance of forces, but also because it is not right. I don't think Israel will change its policy unless it hurts, and BDS will hurt it."

Most recently, Israel's raid on the Free Gaza flotilla, which killed at least nine activists, has added fuel to the campaign. The attack on a humanitarian ship seemed to reignite much of the international furor from the Gaza invasion of the year before, as it highlighted Israel's inhumane policy of collective punishment in the besieged territory. And with this latest outrage came even louder calls for accountability.

BDS represents three strategies: boycotts are commonly carried out by individuals, divestment by institutions and sanctions by governments. For example, organizers have called on people to avoid buying products made in Israeli settlements; on churches to sell stocks of companies such as Caterpillar, which makes the infamous D9 bulldozer used to demolish Palestinian homes and fields; and on politicians to make conditional or end US aid to Israel. BDS's proponents argue that unless Israel experiences material, political and moral pressure, it will maintain the status quo. Nobel laureates Shirin Ebadi, Mairead Maguire (Corrigan), Rigoberta Menchu Tum and Jody Williams made this point in a letter supporting the Berkeley divestment bill:

We stand united in our belief that divesting from companies that provide significant support for the Israeli military provides moral and strategic stewardship of tuition and taxpayer-funded public education money. We are all peace makers, and we believe that no amount of dialogue without economic pressure can motivate Israel to change its policy of using overwhelming force against Palestinian civilians.

The movement has won adherents by saying that it will accept any gesture of boycott or divestment that Westerners are willing to make. "If you only want to boycott an egg, we want you to boycott an egg," said Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which is part of the BNC, during a tour of America last year to drum up support.

Even the Palestinian Authority—never celebrated for its connection to the grassroots—has made a nod toward the movement, with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad vowing to empty Palestinian homes of goods made in the settlements. But BDS's biggest victories have come in the West and have involved divestments from businesses profiting from investment in the West Bank, where 2.5 million Palestinians live under an occupation whose hundreds of armed checkpoints and separate roadways for Jewish colonists have led some South Africans to declare that the system is worse than apartheid. French multinational Veolia Transport was targeted for its role in building a light-rail system that will connect West Jerusalem to settlements in the occupied territories. Veolia dropped out of the project following an escalating international campaign against the firm, during which the Dutch ASN Bank severed ties to Veolia. Israeli diamond merchant Lev Leviev was also targeted because of his funding of settlements. Last year the US investment firm BlackRock divested itself of stock in Leviev's Africa-Israel company, and Britain canceled plans to move its Tel Aviv embassy into a Leviev-owned building. Similarly, the Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank recently divested its shares in the Israeli military contractor Elbit Systems, which supplies components for the separation wall. Wiltrud Rösch-Metzler, vice president of Pax Christi Germany, who helped lead the campaign, called it "a huge success…. [Deutsche Bank] went out of their way to list numerous standards and international ethical commitments to which the bank is party, highlighting how Elbit investments would violate them all."

The immediate aftermath of the flotilla attack saw a surge in BDS activity across Europe. Most notably, Britain's largest union, UNITE, passed a motion to "vigorously promote a policy of divestment from Israeli companies," along with a boycott of Israeli goods and services. At the same time, the Swedish Port Workers Union announced it would refuse to load or unload any ships coming to or from Israel for nine days, to protest the flotilla raid.

In the United States, BDS has been percolating among activist groups, churches and campuses for several years. Since 2005 the Presbyterian Church (USA) has undertaken what it calls a "phased, selective divestment" process aimed at five companies benefiting from the occupation [see Hasdai Westbrook, "The Israel Divestment Debate," May 8, 2006]. Again, the West Bank is the focus. Adalah-NY, a New York–based justice group, regularly leads pickets of Leviev's Madison Avenue jewelry store and pressured UNICEF and the humanitarian organization Oxfam to distance themselves from Leviev. The peace group Code Pink has led a campaign called "Stolen Beauty" that targets Ahava, a cosmetics company based in a West Bank settlement that uses ingredients from the Dead Sea.

"What we've seen in the past two years is a rapidly growing, diverse movement dedicated to universal human rights and international law," says David Hosey, a spokesman for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition of grassroots organizations that supports BDS. "On campuses and in communities across the United States, people are sending a clear message that if the US government won't hold Israel accountable for violations of Palestinian human rights, then civil society will step up and do the job."

Two of the biggest divestment fights in the past year in some ways could not have been more different—Hampshire College in Massachusetts and the Toronto International Film Festival. One year ago Hampshire students ignited a firestorm with a campus divestment campaign that drew national attention, including calls from Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to student organizers on their cellphones. The Hampshire board of directors voted to divest from six military companies involved in the occupation and to adopt a "social responsibility" screen for Hampshire's investments. Though the administration denied that the divestiture was specifically aimed at the Israeli occupation, the headlines helped catalyze the national student BDS movement. In November the college hosted a divestment organizing conference of student leaders from more than forty campuses, including Berkeley; UC, San Diego; the University of Arizona; and Carleton University in Ottawa—whose campaigns all made news this past spring. The movement won a notable victory in June when the student body of Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington—Rachel Corrie's alma mater—voted to call on the college to divest from companies profiting from the occupation and to ban the use of Caterpillar equipment on campus. The resolution passed with nearly 80 percent of the vote. Evergreen junior Anna Simonton explained that the issue resonated across the student body because of the US role in the conflict. "This issue is something we're all complicit in," she said. "It's our money and our taxes."

At the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, movie premieres were overshadowed by the controversy over a "city to city" promotion by the festival that paired Toronto with Tel Aviv. In a "Toronto Declaration," critics said the showcase had been pushed by the Israeli consulate as part of its efforts to "rebrand" Israel after the horrific public relations fallout from the Gaza war months earlier [see Horowitz and Weiss, "American Jews Rethink Israel," November 2, 2009].

The response from Israel's supporters was immediate and forceful. Big-name stars, including Sacha Baron Cohen and Jerry Seinfeld, came out against the declaration, and so did filmmakers David Cronenberg and Ivan Reitman. Dan Adler, a former executive at the Creative Artists Agency, worked with the Los Angeles Jewish Federation and United Jewish Appeal of Toronto to push the claim that the declaration was a boycott of the festival and a blacklist of Israeli artists. The declaration was neither, but the response was a sign of where the battle was headed, with many Israel supporters describing BDS as a Trojan horse aimed at delegitimizing Israel as a Jewish state.

In January the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv think tank, issued a report describing BDS as part of a campaign "to demonize Israel." The movement has had limited "practical success," the Reut study said, but it has been "highly successful in generating publicity and in mobilizing anti-Israel activism, in effect uniting anti-Zionists with critics of specific Israeli policies." The risk, Reut went on, was to Israel's image: "that such campaigns will create an equivalency between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa that penetrates the mainstream of public and political consciousness."

This fear was echoed by Asher Fredman, a commentator on the website of the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot, who described the BDS movement as a "soft war" against Israel. "The point that must be internalized is that the soft war constitutes not simply a nuisance or even an economic threat," Fredman warned. "It is a process that could play a major role in shaping the future status quo between Israel and the Palestinians."

Many American Jewish community groups have taken action against the movement on a similar basis. The delegitimization worry has generated some surprising alliances between liberal Zionist groups and right-wing hawks. BDS supporters counter that it is Israel's actions, not the protest, that are delegitimizing Israel in the eyes of the public. Ali Abunimah, author, activist and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website, said at the Hampshire BDS conference, "Israel's self-image as a liberal Jewish and democratic state is impossible to maintain against the reality of a militarized, ultranationalist, sectarian Jewish settler colony that has to carry out regular massacres of indigenous civilians in order to maintain its control. Zionism simply cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish, settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance."

Some liberal Jewish organizations and individuals have adopted a now-is-not-the-time policy. Naomi Paiss of the New Israel Fund says she respects colleagues who do not buy goods made in the territories, but she believes an "official" boycott of companies in the territories would be impossible to implement, given that major Israeli companies and the Israeli government itself are involved. "We think it's a delegitimizing tactic, inflammatory, won't end the occupation and isn't productive," she e-mailed. Cora Weiss, a longtime liberal leader who championed Hampshire's South Africa divestment initiative in the 1970s, when she was on the board, says BDS is too broad-brush. "César Chávez led a focused boycott—grapes—and for several years no one ate grapes," she recalls. "That had an impact."

Americans for Peace Now has also criticized BDS as being counterproductive and even anti-Semitic. The longtime peace group said in a recent statement that the campaign creates a "circle the wagons" reaction in the Jewish community:

Such a response is understandable, since much of the pressure for such campaigns comes from historically virulently anti-Israel sources that are often not interested in Israeli security concerns or Palestinian behavior. This in turn creates very real and understandable worries about global anti-Semitism and the perception that the campaigns are not truly (or only) about Israeli policies but rather reflect a deep-seated hatred for and rejection of Israel.

Parts of this ad hoc coalition went into action during the Berkeley divestment debate. J Street, the new alternative Israel lobby, joined forces with such right-wing groups as the Anti-Defamation League, the David Project and StandWithUsSF to decry the original Berkeley senate bill. The issue is "complex," the coalition warned, and that "complexity should be reflected in the dialogue on campus rather than singling out one side or another for condemnation and punishment."

According to the Jewish Daily Forward, Berkeley Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, "coordinated a comprehensive national lobbying campaign consisting of a teach-in, face-to-face meetings with student senators and an intervention by a Nobel laureate [Elie Wiesel], all aimed at robbing the divestment supporters of three senate votes." Adam Naftalin-Kelman, Berkeley Hillel's newly installed executive director, said the strategy was devised at a roundtable convened by Hillel and attended by representatives of local branches of J Street, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Jewish Community Relations Council, as well as local rabbis and Israel's consul general in San Francisco. This strategy included circulating antidivestment talking points that urged students to reframe the debate as an attack on the Jewish community and to avoid talking about the particulars of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

But Jewish organizations face insurgent generational forces over the issue. Some students in J Street's college organizations quietly support BDS as a nonviolent means of doing something to end the oppression of Palestinians. This tension was even on display at J Street's organizing conference in October. During a student workshop called "Reckoning With the Radical Left on Campus: Alternatives to Boycotts and Divestments," there was reportedly considerable interest in divestment campaigns targeting the occupation. At the same time, "J Street U," the student branch of J Street, is officially opposed to divestment and has begun an "Invest, Don't Divest" campaign, which encourages students to "Invest $2 for 2 States" as an alternative to BDS activities on campus.

By opposing direct action, the older generation is arguing that government must take the lead through a peace process that so far has resulted in little more than further Israeli colonization. "I find boycotts kind of distasteful. It's a little bit like collective punishment," says Ralph Seliger, long associated with Meretz USA, a left Zionist organization. "That probably wouldn't be very emotionally satisfying to someone who was upset about the issue. But I think it's part of growing up to understand that the world is not here to give you emotional satisfaction, and in this issue there is both complexity and perplexity, and you need to learn as much as you can, and be receptive to all sides, and be discerning."

Portions of the BDS call have been unsettling even to longtime advocates for Middle East peace. Its support for the refugees' right of return is a deal breaker for many liberal Zionists, who believe Israel needs to maintain a Jewish majority. Other activists have said BDS should focus primarily on the US role in the conflict. Israeli writer and activist Joseph Dana says that while the campaign has informed people around the world about the issue, almost all US military aid to Israel winds up in the United States with military manufacturers, so "it would be more productive for the BDS campaigns to focus on these companies," especially if American citizens are doing the pressuring.

Perhaps the most controversial part of the BDS movement, even for some supporters, has been the call for a cultural and academic boycott. Organizers of the boycott explain that it is directed at institutions, not individuals, meaning that people are encouraged to boycott academic conferences, events or products (i.e., films, talks or performances) sponsored by the Israeli government or Israeli universities but not individual academics based on their politics. MIT scientist Nancy Kanwisher recently circulated anonymous letters of support for an academic boycott from two colleagues. One colleague said that while refusing to support Israeli academic research, "I will continue to collaborate with, and host, Israeli scientific colleagues on an individual basis."

Alisa Solomon, a noted critic of Israel's actions and editor, with Tony Kushner, of Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, says she supports BDS but draws the line at academic boycott. "I believe in and support a lot of [the BDS movement]; I just see a lot of different strains and approaches and am enthusiastic about some (economic boycotts against settlement products, companies participating in and profiting from occupation, plus think we should cut military aid, etc.), generally supportive of others ("don't play Sun City" efforts), and have qualms about academic/cultural in this direction both for the free expression reasons and because it requires declaring some people kosher and some not," she wrote in an e-mail. "I prefer direct to symbolic action, so taking money away from occupation seems to me a far better effort than denouncing, say, a choreographer."

For their part, supporters of the academic boycott say that Israeli universities are implicated in the occupation because they are intimately connected with the Israeli government in ways that outstrip even American university contributions to the Vietnam War effort a generation ago. The argument was lent support last year when Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion University, attacked faculty member (and frequent Nation contributor) Neve Gordon for advocating BDS in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. Gordon had crossed "the boundaries of academic freedom," Carmi said, and she questioned his ability to work at the school: "After his…extreme description of Israel as an 'apartheid' state, how can he, in good faith, create the collaborative atmosphere necessary for true academic research and teaching?"

The controversy came to Tel Aviv University this spring when novelists Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh were named as recipients of a $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation, which is headquartered at the university. Boycott activists, including students from the besieged Gaza Strip, implored Atwood and Ghosh to refuse the award because of its relationship to the university. In the end, the writers accepted the prize and criticized the activists in their joint acceptance speech: "the all-or-nothings want to bully us into being their wholly owned puppets." They also quoted Anthony Appiah, president of PEN American Center, who said, "We have to stand, as we have stood from the very beginning, against the very idea of a cultural boycott. We have to continue to say: Only connect." After she got home, Atwood wrote a piece for Ha'aretz saying that Israel's greatest threat was now internal: "The concept of Israel as a humane and democratic state is in serious trouble."

Another prominent focus of the BDS campaign has been on musicians. In recent months Leonard Cohen played Tel Aviv despite an appeal to him to cancel, while Gil Scott-Heron and Elvis Costello pulled out of their Israeli appearances. Costello explained on his website that his decision was "a matter of instinct and conscience" and that "there are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung." The Forward recently quoted an anonymous music industry insider who said more than fifteen performers have recently refused to play in Israel, and in the week after the flotilla attack three more popular groups—the Klaxons, Gorillaz and the Pixies—canceled upcoming performances to protest the raid.

In the end many in Israel, and its supporters in the United States, return to the fear that BDS is advancing the likelihood of the dissolution of the Jewish state—the delegitimization issue. "The BDS movement seems dominated by those whose endgame is one state, not two," Meretz USA executive director Ron Skolnik wrote in Israel Horizons, a liberal Zionist publication. The movement "apparently wishes to build on legitimate international opposition to the 1967 occupation in order to undermine Israel's independent existence."

Rebecca Vilkomerson says that is not the case. Her group, Jewish Voice for Peace, does not take a position on the two-state versus one-state solution. Many Jewish students who spoke out against the Berkeley measure, she said, objected in highly subjective terms, saying, "We feel marginalized, we feel scared, we feel intimidated, we feel alienated" by the legislation. According to Vilkomerson, the best response to this came from Tom Pessah, an Israeli PhD student at Berkeley and co-author of the bill, who said that it was "OK" to have such feelings. He says he also felt uncomfortable when he first learned how much of his freedom in Israel was based on Palestinian dispossession—and so he feared what justice would entail.

Such anxieties would seem to accompany any transformative social movement, and BDS supporters are beginning to acknowledge them. Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouthi addressed the issue in his appeal to the Berkeley students on grounds they might best understand. He has lived his life under occupation, he wrote; he and his community seek freedom: "Do not stand in the way like those angry Alabama students 50 years ago blocking integration. You have, I trust, nothing in common with those students but misplaced fear."

The Berkeley bill failed, but the all-night debates only seemed to give the movement confidence that the next vote will go differently. We might not have to wait long to find out: six more American university student bodies are said to be taking up the call in the near future.

AVENGING ANGELS

This year has seen a dramatic shift in American Jews’ attitudes toward Israel. In January many liberal Jews were shocked by the Gaza war, in which Israel used overwhelming force against a mostly defenseless civilian population unable to flee. Then came the rise to power of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose explicitly anti-Arab platform was at odds with an American Jewish electorate that had just voted 4 to 1 for a minority president. Throw in angry Israelis writing about the "rot in the Diaspora," and it’s little wonder young American Jews feel increasingly indifferent about a country that has been at the center of Jewish identity for four decades.

These stirrings on the American Jewish street will come to a head in late October in Washington with the first national conference of J Street, the reformation Israel lobby. J Street has been around less than two years, but it is summoning liberal–and some not so liberal–Jews from all over the country to "rock the status quo," code for AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).

Sure sounds like a velvet revolution in the Jewish community, huh? Not so fast. The changes in attitudes are taking place at the grassroots; by and large, Jewish leaders are standing fast. And as for policymakers, the opening has been slight. There seems little likelihood the conference will bring us any closer to that holy grail of the reformers: the ability of a US president, not to mention Congress, to put real pressure on Israel.

First the good news. There’s no question the Gaza conflict has helped break down the traditional Jewish resistance to criticizing Israel. Gaza was "the worst public relations disaster in Israel’s history," says M.J. Rosenberg, a longtime Washington analyst who reports for Media Matters Action Network. For the first time in a generation, leading American Jews broke with the Jewish state over its conduct. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen said he was "shamed" by Israel’s actions, while Michelle Goldberg wrote in the Guardian that Israel’s killing of hundreds of civilians as reprisal for rocket attacks was "brutal" and probably "futile."

Even devoted friends of Israel Leon Wieseltier and Michael Walzer expressed misgivings about the disproportionate use of force, and if Reform Jewish leaders could not bring themselves to criticize the war, the US left was energized by the horror. Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink, threw herself into the cause of Gazan freedom after years of ignoring Israel-Palestine, in part out of deference to her family’s feelings. In The Nation Naomi Klein came out for boycott, divestment and sanctions; later, visiting Ramallah, she apologized to the Palestinians for her "cowardice" in not coming to that position earlier.

These were prominent Jews. But they echoed disturbance and fury among Jews all around the country over Israel’s behavior. Rabbi Brant Rosen of Evanston, Illinois, describes the process poetically. For years he’d had an "equivocating voice" in his head that rationalized Israel’s actions. "During the first and second intifadas and the war in Lebanon, I would say, ‘It’s complicated,’" he says. "Of course, Darfur is complicated, but that doesn’t stop the Jewish community from speaking out. There’s nothing complicated about oppression. When I read the reports on Gaza, I didn’t have the equivocating voice anymore."

In the midst of the war, Rosen participated in a panel at a Reconstructionist synagogue in Evanston organized by the liberal group Brit Tzedek v’Shalom and read a piece from a local Palestinian describing her family’s experience in Gaza. "It was a gut-wrenching testimonial. It caused a stir in the congregation. Some people were very angry at me; others were uncomfortable but wanted to engage more deeply," Rosen says. The rabbi has gone on to initiate an effort called Ta’anit Tzedek, or the Jewish Fast for Gaza. Each month over seventy rabbis across the country along with interfaith leaders and concerned individuals partake in a daylong fast in order "to end the Jewish community’s silence over Israel’s collective punishment in Gaza."

Grassroots Jewish organizations have experienced a surge in interest since the Gaza war. The Oakland-based Jewish Voice for Peace has seen its mailing list double, to 90,000, with up to 6,000 signing on each month. Executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson says JVP is finding Jewish support in unlikely places, like Hawaii, Atlanta, South Florida and Cleveland.

Jewish youth have played a key role. A group of young bloggers, notably Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Spencer Ackerman and Dana Goldstein, have criticized Israel to the point that Marty Peretz of The New Republic felt a need to smear them during the Gaza fighting, saying, "I pity them their hatred of their inheritance." Rosenberg is overjoyed by the trend. "None of them, none of them, is a birthright type or AIPAC type. You’d think that one or two would have the worldview of an old-fashioned superliberal on domestic stuff, pure AIPAC on Israel. But they are so hostile to that point of view."

Dana Goldstein personifies this spirit. A 25-year-old former writer and editor for The American Prospect, she grew up in a Conservative community with close ties to Israel and has made her name doing political journalism. Years ago she vowed never to write about the Middle East; it was a thorny topic, and she felt nothing was to be gained by addressing it. But when Gaza happened, she felt she had to speak out. "The Israeli government is doing little more than devastating an already impoverished society and planting seeds of hatred in a new generation of Palestinians," she wrote in TAP. Gaza was especially dismaying to her because Barack Obama’s election had felt like a new moment. "The Jewish community helped elect Obama, and Obama had a different way of talking about the Middle East," she says. Mainstream Jewish organizations’ steadfast support for Israel’s assault seemed very old school to her.

In this sense, Gaza is the bookend to the 1967 war. Israel’s smashing victory in six days ended two decades of American Jewish complacency about Israel’s existence; many advocates for the state, including neoconservative Doug Feith and liberal hawk Thomas Friedman, found their voices as students at around that time. In the years that followed, American culture discovered the Holocaust, and the imperative "Never again!" gave rise to the modern Israel lobby: American Jews organized with the understanding that they were all that stood between Israel and oblivion.

"Younger people don’t have the baggage of 1967," says Hannah Schwarzschild, a founding member of the new organization American Jews for a Just Peace. "They are applying what they’ve been taught about human rights, equality, democracy and liberal American Jewish values to Israel," she adds, "and Israel-Palestine is moving to the center of their political world."

The shift is most pronounced on campuses, where being pro-Palestinian has become a litmus test for progressive engagement. Last winter a battle over divestment from the Israeli occupation rocked Hampshire College, and many students spearheading the movement were Jewish. One of them, Alexander van Leer, explained his support for divestment in a YouTube video: "I spent last year in Israel, where I firsthand saw a lot of the oppression that was going on there. And it hurt me a lot coming from a Jewish background, where I’ve been taught a lot of the great things about Israel, which I know there are, but I was saddened to see the reality of it."

The Hampshire students are part of an international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that demands Israeli accountability for human rights violations. "Gaza gave BDS a huge boost," says Ali Abunimah, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. "It is shifting power between Israel and Palestinians. It shows there is a price for the status quo."

The growing impact of the BDS movement can be glimpsed in several recent events. Palestinian activists and Code Pink pressured the international human rights organization Oxfam to suspend the actress Kristin Davis (Sex and the City), who had been serving as a goodwill ambassador, over her sponsorship of Ahava, a beauty products company that uses materials from the occupied West Bank (Davis’s commercial relationship with Ahava came to an end soon thereafter). Under similar pressure, a Brazilian parliamentary commission said Brazil should have no part in a proposed agreement that would bring increased trade between Israel and several South American countries until "Israel accepts the creation of the Palestinian state on the 1967 borders."

Then there was the Toronto International Film Festival in September, at which a number of prominent figures, including Jane Fonda, Viggo Mortensen, Danny Glover, Julie Christie and Eve Ensler, signed a declaration opposing the festival’s association with the Israeli consulate and a city-to-city program featuring Tel Aviv as part of a campaign by the Israeli government to "rebrand" itself after the Gaza conflict. The declaration read, in part, "especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime."

Not so long ago, "apartheid" was a hotly disputed term when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now even advocates for Israel, such as entertainment magnate Edgar Bronfman and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, have warned that Israel faces an antiapartheid struggle unless it can get to a two-state solution, and fast. Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, says such statements are a sign that the BDS movement is gaining traction. "The Palestinian national movement does not have power," she says. "BDS is the only source of nonviolent power and is leading to an increasingly sophisticated discourse, but it’s early days yet." Vilkomerson of JVP sees hope: "I think [the sanctions movement] will lead Israelis to shift. People do not want to be pariahs."

In short, the change in the liberal-left discourse has been remarkable. Illinois writer Emily Hauser says she sees it in her synagogue. People once turned their backs on her after she published op-eds assailing Israel over its actions during the second intifada. Today many thank her for voicing their concerns. "The suffering of the [Palestinian] people there is a very, very powerful thing for people to be talking about. The community as a whole is far less likely to throw you out," she says.

What does all this mean for the US political institutions that affect Middle East policy?

There are signs Washington is feeling the changes. Several members of Congress visited Gaza, and some dared to criticize Israel. After Democrats Brian Baird, Keith Ellison and Rush Holt returned, they held a press conference on Capitol Hill led by Daniel Levy, a polished British-Israeli who has played a key role in the emergence of J Street. The Congressmen called for Israel to lift the blockade. After first-term Representative Donna Edwards visited Gaza and called for a vigorous debate about the conflict here, old-line lobbyists came out against her. But J Street rallied to her side, raising $30,000 for her in a show of support.

Alas, those are the highlights. There have been few other courageous profiles. President Obama tried to change the game by speaking of Palestinian "humiliations" in his June speech in Cairo and calling for a freeze in Israeli settlement growth as a condition for progress toward a two-state solution. But the Israeli government has defied him, secure in the knowledge that Jewish leaders in Washington will back it. Dan Fleshler, an adviser to J Street and author of Transforming America’s Israel Lobby, says he’s frustrated by the lack of movement. "What I predicted in my book–that Obama could lay out an American policy and if Israel was recalcitrant about it, and if he took Israel to task in a serious way, he would get enough political support–well, he hasn’t tried it yet." Fleshler is hopeful that the call for a settlement freeze isn’t the last test. "Other tests are coming up."

Another longtime observer of Jewish Washington says the only thing that’s really changed is the presidency. That’s big, but it’s not everything. "Obama is strong and popular (still). He has a majority in Congress. Many in Congress feel that their political fate depends on his success. That is what generates the change in atmosphere here. So yes, there is significant change. But I think it has to do more with the atmosphere created by Bush’s departure and by the new policies of Obama than with generational shifts in the way Jews view Israel or talk about Israel."

And so when Obama has seemed to lose his nerve–say, when he helped to bury the UN’s Goldstone report, which said Israel committed war crimes in Gaza–there has been very little resistance in the Jewish community to his capitulations. When Netanyahu was reported to have maligned Obama aides David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel as "self-hating Jews," there was little outcry in the American Jewish community. And when we asked Representative Steve Rothman, a liberal Democrat, whether he welcomed J Street, he said he didn’t know enough about the group to say, before reciting the same old mantras about the "Jewish state": "It’s always good for more people to get involved to support America’s most important ally in the Middle East…. As our president and vice president have said, Israel’s national security is identical to America’s vital national security."

This is the treacherous landscape that J Street has stepped into, where it has been outflanked on occasion by both the right and the left. During the Gaza conflict, it issued a statement condemning not only Hamas but Israel, too, for "punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them." It was a brave stance for a fledgling Jewish organization trying to build mainstream support, and it brought down the wrath of community gatekeepers. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, wrote in the Forward that the statement displayed "an utter lack of empathy for Israel’s predicament," calling it "morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve." Ouch.

More recently J Street has tacked in the other direction. During the Toronto festival it quietly began collecting signatures for a letter blasting the protest as "shameful and shortsighted." Although never released as a letter, the initiative didn’t endear J Street to the growing grassroots movement. Which is not to say that progressives are not hopeful about its emergence. Rosenberg points out that in its more than fifty-year existence, AIPAC never got the positive publicity J Street got after just one year–a long, favorable portrait in The New York Times Magazine. "All the constellations are coming together. [Executive director] Jeremy Ben-Ami and Daniel Levy have a plan and a message, and they know how to work the media," he says.

J Street is trying to position itself so that it is the only game in town for liberal Jews, affording Jewish advocates for the two-state solution the big political tent they’ve been lacking to this point. Rabbi Yoffie, for instance, will be addressing the J Street national conference, overlooking his ferocious criticism of the organization in January. "Let’s have a broad and generous definition of what constitutes pro-Israel," he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in explaining his pragmatic shift.

The conference is sure to combine culture, youth and politics in such a way as to make AIPAC look about as à la mode as the former Soviet Union. "This is a watershed moment in terms of how people look at institutions," says Isaac Luria, J Street’s campaigns director. "The old legacy institutions are dying." Nadia Hijab says this has been J Street’s main achievement, transforming the terrain for left-leaning Jewish groups by taking on the traditional lobby in the mainstream political arena, mobilizing money and message. "J Street is a positive development as an alternative to AIPAC," Hijab says. "It’s not comparable to AIPAC yet, but in the American context it is very smart."

Political dynamism is precisely what J Street hopes to display at its policy conference. Expected speakers include Senator John Kerry and former Senator Chuck Hagel; 160 members of Congress will serve as hosts for J Street’s first annual Gala Dinner. It might not rival the famous "roll call" of luminaries attending AIPAC’s annual conferences (more than half of Congress showed up last May), but it is an impressive show of firepower all the same.

The ultimate issue is whether J Street will have any effect in bringing about a two-state solution, an idea that, despite official support, has been neglected in Washington nearly to the point of abandonment. Dana Goldstein is thrilled by the possibility that the rubber will finally meet the road. "J Street has had a great influence on intellectual progressives in DC," she says. "There is now a lobby group that engages ideas that have been out there without political will. They are the political arm to this movement."

Some critics on the left argue that conditions on the ground have already made the two-state solution unreachable. There are more than 500,000 Israeli settlers occupying the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with more arriving every day, and Gaza remains under siege. Add to this the political scene inside Israel, where Netanyahu has balked at Washington’s request for a settlement freeze, and you could say that in the sixteen years since the Oslo Accords were signed, the possibility of two states in historic Palestine has never been as far off as it is today.

Abunimah sees the new organization as having little impact. "A kinder and gentler AIPAC does not represent serious change," he says. "J Street is supposed to represent a tectonic shift, but it operates within the peace process paradigm and doesn’t challenge it at all." Still, J Street has clearly panicked conservative Jews. And the Israeli embassy fired a warning shot across J Street’s bow in October, when it warned that the lobby group was working against Israel’s interests.

For its part, J Street knows these are desperate times for the liberal goal of a two-state solution. As Israel becomes more and more isolated globally, the Israeli government and the traditional lobby have only gotten more intransigent. At the AIPAC policy conference last spring, its executive director warned that Israel’s enemies were establishing a "predicate for abandonment" that only AIPAC’s faithful could reverse. Don’t expect such hysteria at the J Street conference, but behind all the hoopla, the organization will similarly be trying to preserve the old ideal of a Jewish state. "Getting Israel another thirty F-16s won’t help us combat the legitimacy issue [with] people who are trying to undermine the right of Israel to have a state." Luria says. "Jews need a state. And that legitimacy window–the cracks in that window are getting wider. They’re dangerous. Dangerous."

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vigorously took up the country’s latest strategy for responding to allegations of human rights abuses: kill the messenger. He denounced a recent report by the UN’s Human Rights Council that had accused Israel of possible crimes against humanity during its assault on Gaza last winter, calling it a “travesty,” a “farce” and a “perversion.” The Hamas terrorists Israel was up against had committed acts akin in history only to the Nazi blitz of British civilians during World War II, Netanyahu asserted. Indeed, in denying a nation’s right to resist attack, the report sought to undermine Israel’s “legitimacy.”

The head of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Judge Richard Goldstone, was “upset” by the speech. “It is disingenuous, to put it lightly, what Netanyahu said,” he told The Nation. “The idea that this is aimed at delegitimating the state of Israel–that is the last thing I would want to do.” Goldstone, a Jew and a Zionist, said that Israel’s leaders were behaving contemptuously, “ignoring the specific allegations and simply launching a broadside.”

Those broadsides began not long after the ascension of the right-wing Netanyahu government in March, when his ministers began painting human rights and peace groups as a fifth column for terrorists. “For the first time the Israeli government is taking an active role in the smearing of human rights groups,” says Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch.

Traditionally that job had gone to Israel’s friends. The executive director of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, for instance, condemned human rights groups this past spring as part of an international “campaign” to dehumanize the Jewish state to the point where “Israel stands alone, isolated and at risk.” But as one international report after another accused Israel of war crimes during the Gaza assault, the Israeli government joined the fight. The government refused to cooperate with Goldstone’s investigation, forcing him to enter Gaza from Egypt. Israeli witnesses had to be flown to Geneva to be interviewed.

The Israeli government has also sought to quash domestic dissent. In April it targeted the anti-militarism organization New Profile, seizing computers and detaining activists. In July, when a group of Israeli veterans called Breaking the Silence released dozens of anonymous soldiers’ testimonies from the Gaza assault describing indifference to civilian targets, the Israeli government went, well, ballistic. It threatened to cut off the financial support the group receives from the Dutch, Spanish and British governments and warned those governments that their support was illegal. Israel indicated that it would look into foreign support that Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Machsom Watch receive as well.

Ron Dermer, a Netanyahu adviser who was raised in Florida, struck a fearsome tone: “We are going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups. We are not going to be sitting ducks in a pond for the human rights groups to shoot at us with impunity.”

Shooting back meant calling out New York-based Human Rights Watch for raising money in Arab countries, an anti-Arab theme that was echoed in a September attack on Human Rights Watch published by the Jerusalem-based advocacy group NGO Monitor. The critique listed staff members who are allegedly “anti-Israel,” with some of the charges as flimsy as the fact that an official had been on the board of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. And as Judge Goldstone found, the Israeli government has refused to cooperate with Human Rights Watch investigations. “Over the last year they have not wanted to meet with us, even when we’ve presented them with very, very detailed questions about IDF conduct based on preliminary investigations,” says program director Iain Levine.

Of course, Palestinian human rights activists are familiar with stonewalling, and much worse. A March 2006 UN report criticized the Israel Defense Forces for the “systematic targeting of peace and human rights activists” and noted that Israel seemed to use administrative detention to deter human rights work. That policy was underscored in September, when Israel arrested Mohammad Othman, a human rights activist, after a visit to Norway, where he had pushed for boycott, divestment and sanctions.

The impetus for the new Israeli strategy appears to be fear of shifting international opinion. As analyst Michael Wahid Hanna of the Century Foundation puts it, Goldstone’s stunning findings may well “take on a life of their own…and make diplomatic life much more tricky.” The Netanyahu government is counting on the United States to block a potential UN Security Council recommendation for an international war crimes tribunal and has warned the Obama administration that the Goldstone report can only hinder the peace process. Certainly human rights reports have emboldened Israel’s critics. Just two days after the release of the report, the British Trade Union Congress, representing more than 6.5 million workers, endorsed the boycott movement against Israel, explaining that the decision was “the culmination of a wave of motions passed at union conferences this year, following outrage at Israel’s brutal war on Gaza.”

We are used to accounting for the costs of the Israeli occupation in concrete terms: so many checkpoints, so many colonies, so many dead civilians. The new Israeli effort suggests an even larger cost: that of the very idea of human rights. The government has yet to question one factual allegation Goldstone has made, says progressive Zionist blogger Jerry Haber. “Israel’s only recourse, after it violates the rights of Palestinians, is to deny that such rights exist.”

You might call it the Great Jewish Hope. This is the belief that because Jewish public opinion is well to the left of mainstream Jewish organizations on such questions as the Iraq War and a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, the misrepresentation has to end. Someday soon, the grassroots Jews are going to say Enough, and the hawkish leaders will turn into pillars of salt. Any day now.

The Great Jewish Hope has risen again this spring because of several new signs of dissatisfaction with the leadership. “There is a growing realization that the more hawkish elements of the pro-Israel community–I’m picking my words because it’s a minefield–have too much of an influence within that community,” says Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now. Adds Charney Bromberg of Meretz USA, “The issue to me is what I believe has been a gross failure on the part of the leadership.”

So far it’s just rumblings. When Senator Barack Obama was pressured in March into backtracking on a sympathetic statement he made about Palestinians, there was grousing even in Jewish quarters about “the Israel lobby.” Around the same time, two articles appeared, one by financier George Soros in The New York Review of Books, the other by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, both arguing that open debate of Israel’s policies was being suppressed and that this was bad for all concerned.

Soros has a special status. It was rumored that the financier might be the actual Great Jewish Hope: that he would fund an alternative Jewish lobby challenging the two leading Jewish organizations, which take an Israel-right-or-wrong position: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Soros has absented himself from that effort, partly because he hasn’t been identified enough with Jewish causes, he says. Still, talk of an alternative lobby continues.

Mitchell Plitnick of Oakland-based Jewish Voice for Peace says: “Efforts are definitely continuing, not as fast as some might hope. There is major Jewish money coming to the Democrats that does support peace, but there’s no lobby to focus it.” Focusing Jewish political money is what AIPAC has long done. Though it is not a PAC, it has a huge membership of individual donors it can claim to represent when pressing Congress to adopt legislation that makes Israel out to be the good guy in the Middle East.

The people who talk about an alternative lobby don’t want to smash AIPAC. Bromberg, who has been involved in the talks, notes, “There is profound concern that Israel is still desperately alone and vulnerable in the world, despite its military strength and economic strength, and its one real political strength is the relationship to the United States.”

Still, left-wing Jews feel alienated from Jewish organizations that supported two disasters–the Iraq War and Israel’s war in Lebanon. “The virtually unqualified support of organized American Jewry for Israel’s brutal actions…is not new but now no longer tolerable to me,” Sara Roy, a scholar at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, writes in a new book, The War on Lebanon. Roy’s views are increasingly common. Dan Fleshler, an activist in the pro-Israel peace community, says that Middle East violence has helped awaken a large “universe” of liberal, politically active Jews. “Many of them are alienated from Israel and want nothing to do with it,” he says. “Maybe the most important thing to them is the Sierra Club. They’re cultural Jews, they’ve never been involved” with Israel per se. Their passivity has allowed right-wing Jews who care more about the issue to affect policy. Fleshler says the challenge to an alternative lobby is figuring out how to capture “the moderate Jewish left” on Israel issues.

Tapping into the restlessness among young left-wing Jews might be a place to start. “I meet these kids all the time on campuses all over the country,” says author Ali Abunimah. “This generation of young Jews is not as tied to the romantic Exodus story of their parents. They want a free and open debate about the rights and wrongs of supporting a country that privileges people based on arbitrary characteristics.”

Jewish peace groups involved in the lobby talks are apprehensive about these new currents. Those groups want to bolster support for Zionism even as they try to undo the forty-year occupation. Bromberg likens the discussion about Israel to a backed-up swamp full of noxious ideas–from critiques of the Israel lobby to calls for a one-state solution. “All of this is happening because the process has been so stagnant for so long,” he argues, and blames the American Jewish leadership for not openly questioning some of Israel’s decisions.

Yet here we are, in what Bromberg agrees is a time of perestroika for American Jews who want to criticize Israel. What are the electoral consequences? Joe Trippi, who managed Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, says that the Democratic base is dividing in ways that recall the Lamont-Lieberman battle of last summer, when many major Jewish donors stuck with Lieberman even after he lost the primary. “You’re starting to see more and more division in the base even among supporters of Israel over [the Iraq] war,” he says. “It’s a split, it’s a schism…. It’s more like a family squabble at the dining table. No one wants a divorce.”

The Great Jewish Hope is that the liberal Jewish money in the political process will separate itself from hawkish Jewish money. Steve Rabinowitz, a Democratic consultant in DC, describes the potential pool: “AIPAC is enormous in terms of influence, in terms of guiding the money. The numbers are gigantic…whether you support them or not, you have to be awed by the success when you see it in action. And yet I think there is even more Jewish money that is not AIPAC affected, affiliated, just because there is so damn much money that happens to be Jewish.”

So far, the Soros article is the biggest sign of such a divide. His defection has created concern in the Jewish leadership that American politicians will cease to think of Jewish money as a monolith supporting a hard line for Israel, thus granting the politicians more freedom to try out better ideas. Indeed, when I talked to AIPAC spokesman Josh Block, he pointed me, unprompted, to printed criticisms of Soros’s claims.

“The danger for AIPAC is that once Humpty Dumpty drops off the wall, you can’t put him together again,” says Abunimah. “And what is keeping the debate from happening now is political brute force. That’s what we see in the Obama case.”

In March an activist at a small gathering in Muscatine, Iowa, asked Obama about his views on the Palestinians, and he answered that they were suffering more than Jews. A reporter for the Des Moines Register printed the statement, and it was widely circulated. Several activists condemned Obama, and Obama promptly retrenched. “Hillary is very practiced about talking about these things,” says AIPAC’s Block. “Obama’s lexicon is broader. People are going to be hurt” by that kind of statement.

The Obama episode creates despair among those who want to get Arab grievances taken seriously in American politics. But Plitnick says the only answer is to work with the people who are most involved in the issue: Jews. “There’s a strong sentiment on the left that says, Forget about the Jewish community, they don’t listen,” says Plitnick. “But politically that’s impossible. I don’t think we’ll be able to stem the influence of AIPAC without Jews taking a major leadership role in doing that.” The birth of an alternative lobby, he notes, would be a major turning point in American politics. And it’s going to happen. Any day now.

For progressives who are even mildly critical of Israel, a never-ending concern is the response of the Jewish community. Generally, Jews are among the biggest backers of liberal causes. But a common refrain from liberal Jews is that Hamas and Hezbollah represent threats to Israel’s very existence, and so conversations about policy take on an emotional and religious character. “There’s a deep schizophrenia in some of the Jewish community, and people who are at the forefront of every single rights issue, from racial justice in the United States to the ethnic cleansing in Darfur–on Israel, it crumbles, and there is all this hand-wringing,” says Sarahleah Whitson of Human Rights Watch. “And everyone [who is critical] is successfully marginalized.”

The struggle for Jewish hearts and minds explains the latest battle in the ideological war over the Middle East: the firestorm over Human Rights Watch’s reports from the Lebanon war. The New York City-based monitor issued a couple-dozen reports during the conflict, some sharply critical of Israel for killing civilians, and has had to fight a rear-guard action to maintain its standing among American Jews.

The leading human rights organization in the world, HRW has a dry and thorough manner that reflects its executive director, lawyer Kenneth Roth, who is given to tweezerlike fact-finding and incisive conclusions, with a moral backbeat. The restrained tone has allowed HRW to grow by half in the past five years and stay firmly in the mainstream. When I asked him if he had a special connection to the New York Times, which frequently cites its reports, Roth quipped, “There’s a phone in the drawer.”

HRW has often been critical of Israel while showing respect for its security concerns. For instance, it has condemned suicide bombing as a war crime and also assailed Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank. On July 12 the Lebanon war began, and soon escalated into a wholesale air attack by Israel on Lebanon (and, yes, a rain of Hezbollah rockets on civilian targets in Israel). HRW’s first critics were the left, which felt HRW was twiddling its thumbs as hundreds died, when it alluded delicately to “potential violations of international humanitarian law” in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. HRW did not issue more forceful statements in the first two weeks of the war, Roth says, because its two researchers couldn’t get into southern Lebanon. Once they got there and spent two days visiting villages, HRW issued a fifty-page report August 3, accusing Israel of war crimes in its “indiscriminate” bombings. The researchers had documented more than a third of the reported civilian deaths at that time and could show that in none of 153 killings were Hezbollah forces or weapons “in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.” HRW alleged a war crime after it visited Qana, the scene of twenty-eight civilian deaths on July 30. There Israeli missiles had hit a three-story house in which people were sheltering. Israeli officials later stated that rocket fire had originated from the village three days before the attack.

HRW’s statements got international news coverage (if only two paragraphs in the Times) but put the group in the cross hairs of the Israel lobby, notably in the New York Sun. The Sun linked Ken Roth with Mel Gibson as an enemy of the Jewish people and said his moral compass was “haywire.” It is tempting to dismiss the four-year-old Sun–whose most memorable contribution to American letters has been its statement that Iraq War protesters were guilty of “treason”–as a right-wing rag. Its backers include Manhattan Institute former chair Roger Hertog and Bruce Kovner, chair of the American Enterprise Institute. But Kovner is also chair of Juilliard, and the Sun is a sophisticated newspaper, with extensive arts and sports coverage. As managing editor Ira Stoll says, the Sun has influence; it represents the views of organized Jewish leaders. Among the Sun‘s readers, says Stoll, are some of HRW’s biggest financial backers. Indeed, in an editorial the Sun said that Robert Bernstein, HRW’s former chair, was having “private agonies” over the group’s reports and quoted Morton Zuckerman, listed as a donor of between $25,000 and $99,000 in HRW’s 2005 report, as saying the reports on Israel were an “outrage…. Human Rights Watch has lost all moral credibility.”

Roth responded to every attack the Sun printed. In one letter he spoke of Israeli “slaughter” and wrote, “An eye for an eye–or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye–may have been the morality of some more primitive moment.” The comment was echoed in smears. The Sun printed a piece by Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League saying that criticisms of the Bible are a classic anti-Semitic stereotype, a diagnosis of Roth’s motivation that Stoll says he shares. “In my view unfortunately and dangerously, it’s increasingly respectable in mainstream circles to engage in old style anti-Jewish stereotypes,” says Stoll. (It seems Roth’s personal history–he went into human rights law in part because as a boy he had listened to his father’s stories of escaping Nazi Germany–is sinister camouflage.)

The Jerusalem Post and New York Daily News soon piled on. Never one to miss the limelight, so did Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who wrote on the Huffington Post that HRW had invented facts. Dershowitz then invoked Jewish solidarity: “Within the last month, virtually every component of the organized Jewish community, from secular to religious, liberal to conservative, has condemned Human Rights Watch for its bias.”

Roth says that HRW was isolated in its role as Israel critic in part because the prospect of the sort of vitriol he faced has scared other groups away from even looking at the Middle East. HRW emergency director Peter Bouckaert explains, “We always get attacked for our findings by the government involved. What makes this case different is, it’s not the government, it’s the external lobby. We have a difficult but positive dialogue with the Israeli government and the IDF. They don’t dismiss us as morally repugnant or irrelevant. They take our findings seriously. The attacks are not about the facts, they’re about insulating Israel from any type of criticism.”

Bouckaert says the attacks represent a real threat to HRW. “All we have is our reputation for credibility and impartiality. We have a lot of Jewish donors and funders, and I think Ken wants to be sure they don’t think of us as not impartial.”

At the height of the criticism, HRW organized a conference call with Bouckaert and two other researchers who were on the ground in the Middle East and members of the HRW board, to explain their methods. “They made it clear that they understood the political sensitivities and were bending over backward to be impartial,” says Michael Gellert, an HRW board member. So much bending over backward can give a fact-finder a backache. Bouckaert says that Israel is “an emotionally upsetting place to work” because while he sometimes feels outrage at Israeli actions, he is compelled to report publicly in the most careful and balanced terms. That pressure grinds researchers down. They leave or avoid the subject, which is the aim of the critics. “We’re one of the last ones standing in the mainstream,” says Whitson.

Remaining in the mainstream is vital to HRW. While Roth stuck to his guns on Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombings, and the organization repeatedly condemned Israel’s use of cluster bombs in civilian areas, it also seemed to go out of its way toward the end of the war to blast both sides. The chariness alienated the international left. Roel Bramer, a Dutch-Canadian, resigned from the board of the Toronto chapter of HRW in August, saying its criticism of Israel was too tepid. In a resignation letter, Bramer wrote, “Ken [Roth] is quoted as stating that we abide by a ‘fact/research-based application of international human rights and humanitarian law'” and criticize governments on human rights grounds, not political ones. “I feel that HRW should protest boldly and loudly against this borderline genocide and the calamitous rubble and grief Israel has left behind.”

Roth does not appear to be too worried about his credibility on the left. He is much more concerned about the right, even if that means fielding arguments about whether the Bible is primitive. One board member, Shibley Telhami, an Arab-American who is sometimes enraged by Israel’s actions, says engaging the pro-Israel community is vital to the organization’s mission, and his own. “The New York Sun is framing HRW in a context that resonates with a community that’s much broader…. What you have here is Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, within the American political mainstream, not just the Jewish groups, saying that this is about Israel’s right to defend itself and let them finish the job. But you’ve got to connect, so you think, What is the best mix of effectiveness, credibility and principle? I struggle with that every day.”

Neoconservatism is an elite calling. It thrives in think tanks, not union halls; its proponents want most of all to influence the powerful. No wonder Ivy League labels have always been important to neocons. This fixation on intellectual prestige explains the recent neocon uprising over the possibility that Juan Cole, scholar and blogger, would become a Yale professor. It was one thing for Cole to hold forth from the University of Michigan, where he has been a professor for twenty years. But Yale would provide “honor” and “imprimatur,” says Scott Johnson, a right-wing blogger. “That’s a huge thing, to have them bless all his rantings on that blog.”

On June 2 Johnson broke the story (on powerlineblog.com) that Yale’s Senior Appointments Committee had the day before rejected Cole after three other Yale committees had signed off on him. By then a process that usually takes place behind closed doors had become thoroughly politicized by the right. “I’m saddened and distressed by the news,” John Merriman, a Yale history professor, said of the rejection. “I love this place. But I haven’t seen something like this happen at Yale before. In this case, academic integrity clearly has been trumped by politics.”

The controversy erupted this spring after two campus periodicals reported that Cole was under consideration by Yale for a joint appointment in sociology and history. In an article in the Yale Herald, Campus Watch, a pro-Israel group that monitors scholars’ statements about the Middle East, was quoted as saying that Cole lacked a “penetrating mind,” and suggesting that Yale was “in danger of sacrificing academic credibility in exchange for the attention” Cole would generate. Alex Joffe, then the director of Campus Watch, told me Cole “has a conspiratorial bent…he tends to see the Mossad and the Likud under his bed.” For its part, the Yale Daily News twice featured attacks on Cole by former Bush Administration aide Michael Rubin, a Yale PhD associated with Campus Watch and the American Enterprise Institute. In an op-ed Rubin wrote, “Early in his career, Cole did serious academic work on the 19th century Middle East…. He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary.”

Academics dispute this. They say that Yale was drawn to Cole by top-rank scholarly achievement. He is president of the Middle East Studies Association, speaks Arabic and Persian, and has published several books on Egyptian and Shiite history. “We were impressed with Cole’s scholarly work, and a wide set of letters showed that he is also highly regarded by other scholars in the field,” says political science professor Frances Rosenbluth, a member of the Yale search committee that chose Cole. Zachary Lockman, an NYU Middle Eastern studies professor, says, “It’s fair to say he is probably among the leading historians of the modern Middle East in this country.” Joshua Landis, a professor at University of Oklahoma, describes Cole as “top notch.”

“He was the wunderkind of Middle East Studies in the 1980s and 1990s,” Landis says. “He can be strident on his blog, which is one reason it is the premier Middle East blog…. [But] Juan Cole has done something that no other Middle East academic has done since Bernard Lewis, who is 90 years old: He has become a household word. He has educated a nation. For the last thirty years every academic search for a professor of Middle East history at an Ivy League university has elicited the same complaint: ‘There are no longer any Bernard Lewises. Where do you find someone really big with expertise on many subjects who is at home in both the ivory tower and inside the Beltway?’ Today, Juan Cole is that academic.”

Of course, Cole is on the left, while Lewis is a neoconservative. And it is hard to separate Cole’s scholarly reputation from his Internet fame. Cole started his blog, Informed Comment, a few months after September 11. He quickly became the leading left blogger on terrorism and the Middle East, delivering every day, often by translating from Arabic newspapers. He could discuss the pros and cons of, say, an invasion of Iraq with complete authority. Here, for instance, are some of his writings in the lead-up to war: “The Persian Gulf is the site of two-thirds of the proven petroleum reserves in the world. Yet the countries along its littoral have no means of providing security to themselves…. The two exceptions here are Iran and Iraq…. Iraq did so badly in the Iran-Iraq war, however, that it left itself without credibility as security provider in the region. It also was left deeply in debt.” A US invasion “will inevitably be seen in the Arab world as a neo-colonial war…. The final defeat of the Baath Party will be seen as a defeat of its ideals, which include secularism, improved rights for women and high modernism. Arabs in despair of these projects are likely to turn to radical Islam as an alternative outlet for their frustrations.”

At times, his voice rose.

“The idea that terrorists willing to commit suicide will be afraid of the US after it invades Iraq is just a misreading of human nature,” he wrote in 2003. “If the US really wanted to stop terrorism, it would invade the West Bank and Gaza and liberate the Palestinians to have their own state and self-respect.”

Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has always been important in Cole’s reading of the Middle East. Naturally, Israel is central to neocons, too. Michael Rubin accused Cole of missing the good news from Iraq and of being anti-Semitic. That charge was soon taken up in the Wall Street Journal and in the New York Sun. “Why would Yale ever want to hire a professor best known for disparaging the participation of prominent American Jews in government?” wrote two Sun authors. One of them, according to Scott Johnson, was a student of Alan Dershowitz’s at Harvard. The other is Johnson’s daughter, Eliana, then a Yale senior. After that article, Johnson, a Minneapolis lawyer and Dartmouth grad, wrote up the case on his blog, which describes itself as a friend of Israel, and attacked Cole as a “moonbat.”

Alex Joffe denies that a network went after Cole. “There wasn’t any organized opposition. It was a question of people becoming aware of it somehow and each getting in his two cents.” Asked about pot-stirrers, Johnson says, “I think if you look anywhere but Yale, you’d be making a mistake.”

Well, if this isn’t a network, neither are the professionals who exchange cards at New York parties. Joel Mowbray, a Washington Times columnist who has assailed the consideration of Cole, sent a letter to a dozen Yale donors, many of them Jewish, warning of Cole’s possible appointment. According to the Jewish Week, “Several faculty members said they had heard that at least four major Jewish donors…have contacted officials at the university urging that Cole’s appointment be denied.” Still, Johnson’s point is well taken. It must have been Yale insiders who got the news out to Cole’s enemies, as Cole’s appointment passed one after another of several institutional hurdles. The vote in the history department was said to be 13 to 7 with three abstentions (which count as no). This signaled unusual opposition to an appointment recommended by an interdisciplinary search committee. Yale’s history department includes prominent supporters of the Bush international agenda like John Gaddis and Donald Kagan.

After Cole’s defeat, Rubin suggested that Yale now had an opportunity to hire a real talent, someone at the level of, say, Aaron Friedberg, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. Who is Friedberg? A former national security aide to Vice President Cheney through the first two years of the war that the-network-that-is-not-a-network wanted to get us into. Having a role in the greatest foreign-policy disaster of our generation is evidently a worthy credential in academia. Douglas Feith, after all, is about to join the Georgetown faculty.

As Scott Johnson notes, the left didn’t care about Cole’s appointment as much as the right. (Maybe because the left values his blog, which an Ivy League job might have cut in on.) In retrospect, though, it is appalling to consider what was done to Cole’s reputation over this blue-chip appointment.

Cole chose not to discuss the process publicly while it was happening. “I think that a hiring process in academia is a professional matter,” he told me. But he also said that Yale sought him out, and that the vilification process was orchestrated. “There were clearly phone calls amongst the persons doing it.” The Yale Herald quoted two Michigan students one of whom had visited him at his office in Ann Arbor and questioned his openness to Jews. “I am frankly suspicious,” Cole says. “How did [the Herald] track down these students?”

Lockman, Cole’s fellow Middle Eastern scholar at NYU (speaking for himself only), finds the process fearful. “Since September 11 there has been a concerted effort by a small but well-funded group of people outside academia to monitor very carefully what all of us are saying, ready to jump on any sign of deviation from what they see as acceptable opinion. It’s an attack on academic freedom, and it’s not very healthy for our society.”

Cole declined to talk about his feelings on losing the job. Still, the pain came through in his comments. Modern Middle Eastern studies has always been politicized, he says. He jumped into the blogosphere for a simple reason, to counter the common assertion that the Israeli occupation had nothing at all to do with the 9/11 attacks. “I’m from a military family. I had two cousins working in the Pentagon that was attacked. So this was personal to me. My country had been attacked. The mistreatment of the Palestinians and the high-handed policies of the Israeli right were deeply implicated in the attacks. I was angry.

“I knew when I began to speak out that I wasn’t going to be hired. I knew my academic career was over. I knew that I can be in this place, be a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Michigan for the rest of my life. But I would never be a dean. I would never be a provost. I would never be in the Ivy League. I’m not surprised. I’m not upset. Actually, the bizarre thing is that Juan Cole was considered by Yale in the first place.”

Intellectuals can only dream of having the impact that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have had this spring. Within hours of their publishing a critique of the Israel lobby in The London Review of Books for March 23, the article was zinging around the world, soon to show up on the front pages of newspapers and stir heated discussion on cable-TV shows. Virtually overnight, two balding professors in their 50s had become public intellectuals, ducking hundreds of e-mails, phone messages and challenges to debate.

Titled “The Israel Lobby,” the piece argued that a wide-ranging coalition that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, leading journalists and of course the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, exerts a “stranglehold” on Middle East policy and public debate on the issue. While supporting the moral cause for the existence of Israel, the authors said there was neither a strategic nor a moral interest in America’s siding so strongly with post-occupation Israel. Many Americans thought the Iraq War was about oil, but “the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.”

The shock waves from the article continue to resonate. The initial response was outrage from Israel supporters, some likening the authors to neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper “a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control.” University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner called it “piss-poor, monocausal social science.” Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had “destroyed their professional reputations.” Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong. As time passed (and the Ku Klux Klan remained dormant), a more rational debate began. The New York Times, having first downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute for conveying “blinding flashes of the obvious,” ideas “that were whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone else could hear you.”

While criticisms of the lobby have circulated widely for years and been published at the periphery, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper stands out because it was so frontal and pointed, and because it was published online by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is a professor and outgoing academic dean. “It was inevitably going to take someone from Harvard [to get this discussed],” says Phyllis Bennis, a writer on Middle East issues at the Institute for Policy Studies.

What’s more, the article appeared when public pessimism over the Iraq War was reaching new highs. “The paper was important as a political intervention because the authors are squarely in the mainstream of academic life,” says Norman Finkelstein, a professor of political science at DePaul University dedicated to bringing the issue of Palestinian suffering under the occupation to Americans’ attention. “The reason they’re getting a hearing now is because of the Iraq debacle.” Bennis and Finkelstein, both left-wing critics of Israel, have criticisms of the paper’s findings. Partly this reflects the paper’s origins: Though it was printed in a left-leaning English journal, it was written by theorists of a school associated with the center/right: realism, which holds that the world is a dangerous neighborhood, that good intentions don’t mean very much and that the key to order is a balance of power among armed states. For realists, issues like human rights and how states treat minorities are so much idealistic fluff.

Given the paper’s parentage, the ferment over it raises political questions. How did these ideas get to center stage? And what do they suggest about the character of the antiwar intelligentsia?

Let’s begin with the personalities. The more forceful member of the duo (and the one who would talk to me), Mearsheimer, 58, is by nature an outsider. Though he spent ten years of his youth in the military, graduating from West Point, he wasn’t much for tents and guns even as he latched on to David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest because it explained a horrible war. Out of pure intellectual curiosity Mearsheimer, who had become an officer in the Air Force, enrolled in graduate school classes at the University of Southern California. Today he is a realist powerhouse at the University of Chicago, publishing such titles as Conventional Deterrence. Like Mearsheimer, Walt, 50, grew up in privilege, but he is a courtly and soft-spoken achiever. Stanford, Berkeley and Princeton figured in his progress to Harvard. “I think Steve enjoyed moving into institutional roles,” says one academic. “Steve likes a good argument, but unlike John he can be polite. John enjoys the image of the bomb thrower.”

Mearsheimer was hawkish about Israel until the 1990s, when he began to read Israel’s “New Historians,” a group of Israeli scholars and journalists (among them Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev) who showed that Israel’s founders had been at times ruthless toward Palestinians. Mearsheimer’s former student Michael Desch, a professor at Texas A&M, recalls the epiphany: “For a lot of us, who didn’t know a lot about the Israel/Palestine conflict beyond the conventional wisdom and Leon Uris’s Exodus, we saw a cold war ally; and the moral issue and the common democracy reinforced a strong pro-Israel bent.” Then Desch rode to a conference with two left-wing Jewish academics familiar with the New Historians. “My initial reaction was the same as John’s: This is crazy. [They argued that] the Israelis weren’t the victims of the ’48 war to destroy the country. Ben-Gurion had real doubts about partition. Jordan and Israel talked about dividing up the West Bank together. All those things were heretical. They seemed to be coming from way, way out in left field. Then we started reading [them], and it completely changed the way we looked at these things.” Mearsheimer says he had been blinded by Uris’s novel. “The New Historians’ work was a great revelation to me. Not only do they provide an abundance of evidence to back up their stories about how Israel was really created, but their stories make perfect sense. There is no way that waves of European Jews moving into a land filled with Palestinians are going to create a Jewish state without breaking a lot of Palestinian heads…. It’s just not possible.”

September 11 was a catalytic event for the realists. Mearsheimer and Walt came to see the close US alliance with Israel as damaging American relations with other states. American policy toward the Palestinians was serving to foster terrorism, Walt wrote in a book called Taming American Power. And you weren’t allowed to discuss it. Walt spoke of the chilling effect of the Israel lobby (on a University of California, Berkeley, TV show called Conversations With History last fall): “Right now, this has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one where only one side is being heard from.”

For his part, Mearsheimer saw the lobby’s power in an episode in the spring of 2002, when Bush called on Ariel Sharon to withdraw troops from Palestinian towns on the West Bank. Sharon shrugged him off, and Bush caved. Mearsheimer says by e-mail: “At the American Political Science Association convention in the late summer of 2002, I was talking to a friend about the US-Israel relationship. We shared similar views, and agreed that lots of others thought the same way. I said to him over the course of a dinner that I found it quite amazing that despite widespread recognition of the lobby’s influence, no one could write about it and get it published in the United States. He told me that he thought that was not the case, because he had a friend at The Atlantic who was looking for just such an article.”

The Atlantic had long hoped to assign a piece that would look systematically at where Israel and America shared interests and where those interests conflicted, so as to examine the lobby’s impact. The magazine duly commissioned an article in late 2002 by Mearsheimer and Walt, whom Mearsheimer had brought in. “No way I would have done it alone,” Mearsheimer says. “You needed two people of significant stature to withstand the firestorm that would invariably come with the publication of the piece.”

Mearsheimer and Walt had plenty of ideological company. After 9/11, many other realists were questioning American policy in the Mideast. Stephen Van Evera, an international relations professor at MIT, began writing papers showing that the American failure to deal fairly with the Israel/Palestine conflict was fostering support for Al Qaeda across the Muslim world. Robert Pape, a professor down the hall from Mearsheimer at Chicago, published a book, Dying to Win, showing that suicide bombers were not religiously motivated but were acting pragmatically against occupiers.

The writer Anatol Lieven says he reluctantly took on the issue after 9/11 as a matter of “duty”–when the Carnegie Endowment, where he was a senior associate, asked him to. “I knew bloody well it would bring horrible unpopularity…. All my personal loyalties are the other way. I’ve literally dozens of Jewish friends; I have no Palestinian friends.” Lieven says he was a regular at the Aspen Institute till he brought up the issue. “I got kicked out of Aspen…. In early 2002 they held a conference on relations with the Muslim world. For two days nobody mentioned Israel. Finally, I said, ‘Look, this is a Soviet-style debate. Whatever you think about this issue, the entire Muslim world is shouting about it.’ I have never been asked back.” In 2004 Lieven published a book, America Right or Wrong, in which he argued that the United States had subordinated its interests to a tiny militarized state, Israel. Attacked as an anti-Semite, Lieven says he became a pariah among many colleagues at the Carnegie Endowment, which he left for the fledgling New America Foundation.

Yet another on this path was the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, a neoconservative-turned-realist. In 2004 he attended Charles Krauthammer’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute about spreading democracy and was shocked by the many positive effects Krauthammer saw in the Iraq War. Fukuyama attacked this militaristic thinking in an article in The National Interest. He wrote with sympathy of the Palestinians and said the neoconservatives confused American and Israeli interests. “Are we like Israel, locked in a remorseless struggle with a large part of the Arab and Muslim world, with few avenues open to us for dealing with them other than an iron fist?… I believe that there are real problems in transposing one situation to the other.” Krauthammer responded in personal terms, all but accusing Fukuyama of anti-Semitism. “The remarkable thing about the debate was how oblique Frank’s reference to the issue was and how batshit Krauthammer and the other neoconservatives went,” says Mike Desch. “It is important to them to keep this a third rail in American politics. They understood that even an elliptical reference would open the door, and they immediately all jumped on Frank to make the point, ‘Don’t go there.'” It seems to have worked. The soft-spoken Fukuyama left out the critique of the neocon identification with Israel in his recent book, America at the Crossroads.

“We understood there would be a significant price to pay,” Mearsheimer says. “We both went into this understanding full well that our chances of ever being appointed to a high-level administrative position at a university or policy-making position in Washington would be greatly damaged.” They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005, which was rejected. “[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote,” managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic‘s policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the authors.

“I believe they got cold feet,” Mearsheimer says. “They said they thought the piece was a terrible–they thought the piece was terribly written. That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious to know what really happened.” The writing as such can’t have been the issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the analysis, topped off with a strong argument.

That might have been the end of it. The authors “nosed around,” Mearsheimer says, looking for another US publisher, then gave up, concluding that the piece could not be published as an article or book in “a mainstream outlet” in the United States. Half a year passed. Then a scholar Mearsheimer will not identify called to say that a staffer at The Atlantic had passed along the piece, which he found “magisterial.” The scholar put the authors in touch with Mary-Kay Wilmers, the London Review of Books editor, and last fall she contracted to publish the piece.

“John, who I think is a little bit more hardheaded politically and intellectually, expected what came,” Desch says. “Steve was more confident that facts and logic would carry the day, and from some conversations I’ve had he was clearly shellshocked. He was in an exposed position at Harvard.” Desch adds that when the New York Sun linked the authors to white supremacist David Duke, who praised the article, “it came as a real kick in the stomach.” Some measure of Walt’s exposure is financial. Bernard Steinberg, director of Harvard’s Hillel center, brought this issue up unprompted to me: “I talked to someone in Harvard development and asked what the fallout had been, and he said, ‘It’s been seismic.'”

Something in Mearsheimer’s spirit would seem to be fulfilled in upsetting people by expressing ideas that he deeply believes. “When you write about this subject and you’re critical of Israeli policy or critical of the US-Israel relationship, you are invariably going to be called an anti-Semite,” he says. When I said he had autonomy as a professor to enjoy “free discourse” in this country, he said, “What free discourse in the United States? What free discourse are you talking about?” Mearsheimer’s friend Van Evera criticizes him for allowing his legitimate anger over being shut out of the discourse to affect the tone of the article. But Mearsheimer was expressing his sharp personality; and doesn’t passion give life to an argument?

The authors have gotten support from hundreds of e-mails, three-quarters of which congratulate them, Mearsheimer says. Foreign-service officers in Washington who are frightened by the neoconservative program are said to be excitedly passing the article around. The European left has also welcomed the paper, saying that these issues must be discussed. And even in Israel the article has had a respectful reading, with a writer in Ha’aretz saying it was a “wake-up call” to Americans about the relationship.

Many liberals and leftists have signaled their discomfort with the paper. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, says the issue of Jewish influence is “so incendiary and so complicated that I don’t know how anyone can talk about this in the public sphere. I know that’s a problem. But there’s not enough space in any article you write to do this in a way that doesn’t cause more rancor. And so much of this paper was glib and poorly researched.” In Salon Michelle Goldberg wrote that the authors had “blundered forth” into the argument in “clumsy and crude” ways, for instance failing to distinguish between Jewish Likudniks and Jewish support of Democrats in Congress. Noam Chomsky wrote that the authors had ignored the structural forces in the American economy pushing for war, what he calls “the tight state-corporate linkage.” Norman Finkelstein makes a similar distinction. “I’m glad they did it,” he says of the publication, but he argues that while the pro-Israel lobby controls public debate on the issue, and even Congress, the lobby can’t be shown to decide the “elite opinion” that creates policy in the Mideast.

One problem with this argument is that in insisting on the primacy of corporate decision-making, it diminishes the realm of political culture and shows a real dullness about how ideas percolate in Washington. Think tanks, the idea factories that help produce policy, used to have a firmly WASPish character. But as Walt and Mearsheimer show, hawkishly pro-Israel forces have established a “commanding presence” at such organizations over much of the spectrum, from the Brookings Institution in the center to the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation on the right. After Bush’s 2000 victory, Dick Cheney made sure that his neoconservative friends were posted throughout the Administration, and after 9/11 their militaristic ideas swept the government like a fever. In a fearful time, their utter distrust of Arab and Muslim culture seemed to the Bushies to explain the world. “You have an alliance between neocons and aggressive nationalists that goes back thirty years. Their ideas have bled into one another,” says Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service. “And neoconservatives put Israel at the absolute center of their worldview.” One of the tenets of neocon belief was that the road to peace in Israel/Palestine led through Baghdad: Give Israel a greater sense of security and you can solve the Palestinian issue later. That has been the government policy.

Lieven says, “It’s self-evidently true that other interests and ambitions are involved in the war with Iraq…. Oil is very much–imperial ambitions are very much there.” But, he adds, “it is crazy to suggest on the one hand that the neoconservatives had a great influence on the Bush Administration and to say that it didn’t play out in terms of a hard interest for Israel. If you think the neocons were not running the whole show but had a definite impact, then you can’t possibly suggest that Israeli interests were not involved.”

The liberal intelligentsia have failed in their responsibility on specifically this question. Because they maintain a nostalgic view of the Establishment as a Christian stronghold in which pro-Israel Jews have limited power, or because they like to make George Bush and the Christian end-timers and the oilmen the only bad guys in a debacle, or because they are afraid of pogroms resulting from talking about Jewish power, they have peeled away from addressing the neocons’ Israel-centered view of foreign relations. “It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby,” Wilmers, LRB‘s (Jewish) editor, says with dismay. Certainly the old antiwar base of the Democratic Party has been fractured, with concerns about Israel’s security driving the wedge. In the 2004 primaries, Howard Dean was forced to correct himself after–horrors–calling for a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East. The New Yorker‘s courageous opposition to the Vietnam War was replaced this time around by muted support for the Iraq War. Tom Friedman spoke for many liberals when he said on Slate that bombs in Israeli pizza parlors made him support aggression in Iraq. Meantime, out of fear of Dershowitz, or respect for him, the liberal/mainstream media have declined to look into the lobby’s powers, leaving it to two brave professors. The extensive quibbling on the left over the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has often seemed defensive, mistrustful of Americans’ ability to listen to these ideas lest they cast Israel aside.

Mearsheimer and Walt at times were simplistic and shrill. But it may have required such rhetoric to break through the cinder block and get attention for their ideas. Democracy depends on free exchange, and free exchange means not always having to be careful. Lieven says we have seen in another system the phenomenon of intellectuals strenuously denouncing an article that could not even be published in their own country: the Soviet Union. “If somebody like me, an absolute down-the-line centrist on this issue–my position on Israel/Palestine is identical to that of the Blair government–has so much difficulty publishing, it’s a sign of how extremely limited and ethically rotten the media debate is in this country.”

Realist ideas are resonating now because the utopian ideas that drove the war are so frightening and demoralizing. Indeed, Fukuyama has moved toward what he calls Wilsonian realism. Lieven is about to come out with a book (co-edited with a right-winger from the Heritage Foundation) on ethical realism. These ideas are appealing because they offer a better way of explaining a dangerous world than the idea that our bombs are good bombs and that Muslims only respect force. Left-wingers and liberals who find themselves alienated from the country’s warmongering leadership have to acknowledge the potential in these ideas to forge a coalition of outs. But the price of effecting such a realignment is high: It means separating from the Israel lobby (or reforming it!) and trusting that a fairer American policy in the Middle East will not mean abandoning Israel.

The slim book that was suddenly the most controversial work in the West in early March was not easy to find in the United States. Amazon said it wasn’t available till April. The Strand bookstore didn’t have it either. You could order it on Amazon-UK, but it would be a week getting here. I finally found an author in Michigan who kindly photocopied the British book and overnighted it to me; but to be on the safe side, I visited an activist’s apartment on Eighth Avenue on the promise that I could take her much-in-demand copy to the lobby for half an hour. In the elevator, I flipped it open to a random passage:

“I can’t cool boiling waters in Russia. I can’t be Picasso. I can’t be Jesus. I can’t save the planet single-handedly. I can wash dishes.”

The book is the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Composed from the journal entries and e-mails of the 23-year-old from Washington State who was crushed to death in Gaza three years ago under a bulldozer operated by the Israeli army, the play had two successful runs in London last year and then became a cause celebre after a progressive New York theater company decided to postpone its American premiere indefinitely out of concern for the sensitivities of (unnamed) Jewish groups unsettled by Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections. When the English producers denounced the decision by the New York Theatre Workshop as “censorship” and withdrew the show, even the mainstream media could not ignore the implications. Why is it that the eloquent words of an American radical could not be heard in this country–not, that is, without what the Workshop had called “contextualizing,” framing the play with political discussions, maybe even mounting a companion piece that would somehow “mollify” the Jewish community?

“The impact of this decision is enormous–it is bigger than Rachel and bigger than this play,” Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother, said. “There was something about this play that made them feel so vulnerable. I saw in the Workshop’s schedule a lesbian play. Will they use the same approach? Will they go to the segment of the community that would ardently oppose that?”

In this way, Corrie’s words appear to have had more impact than her death. The House bill calling for a US investigation of her killing died in committee, with only seventy-eight votes and little media attention. But the naked admission by a left-leaning cultural outlet that it would subordinate its own artistic judgment to pro-Israel views has served as a smoking gun for those who have tried to press the discussion in this country of Palestinian human rights. Indeed, the admission was so shocking and embarrassing that the Workshop quickly tried to hedge and retreat from its statements. But the damage was done; people were asking questions that had been consigned to the fringe: How can the West condemn the Islamic world for not accepting Muhammad cartoons when a Western writer who speaks out on behalf of Palestinians is silenced? And why is it that Europe and Israel itself have a healthier debate over Palestinian human rights than we can have here?

When she died on March 16, 2003, Rachel Corrie had been in the Middle East for fifty days as a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group recruiting Westerners to serve as “human shields” against Israeli aggression–including the policy of bulldozing Palestinian houses to create a wider no man’s land between Egypt and then-occupied Gaza. Corrie was crushed to death when she stood in front of a bulldozer that was proceeding toward a Palestinian pharmacist’s house. By witnesses’ accounts, Corrie, wearing a bright orange vest, was clearly visible to the bulldozer’s driver. An Israeli army investigation held no one accountable.

Corrie’s horrifying death was a landmark event: It linked Palestinian suffering to the American progressive movement. And it was immediately politicized. Pro-Israel voices sought to smear Corrie as a servant of terrorists. They said that the Israeli army was merely trying to block tunnels through which weapons were brought from Egypt into the occupied territories–thereby denying that Corrie had died as the result of indiscriminate destruction. Hateful e-mails were everywhere. “Rachel Corrie won’t get 72 virgins but she got what she wanted,” said one.

Few knew that Corrie had been a dedicated writer. “I decided to be an artist and a writer,” she had written in a journal, describing her awakening, “and I didn’t give a shit if I was mediocre and I didn’t give a shit if I starved to death and I didn’t give a shit if my whole damn high school turned and pointed and laughed in my face.”

Corrie’s family felt it most urgent to get her words out to the world. The family posted several of her last e-mails on the ISM website (and they were printed in full by the London Guardian). These pieces were electrifying. They revealed a passionate and poetical woman who had long been attracted to idealistic causes and had put aside her work with the mentally ill and environmental causes in the Pacific Northwest to take up a pressing concern, Palestinian human rights. Thousands responded to the Corries, including a representative of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, London, who asked if the theater could use Rachel’s words in a production–and, oh, are there more writings? Cindy Corrie could do little more than sit and drink tea. She had family tell the Royal Court, Give us time.

It was another year before Sarah Corrie dragged out the tubs in which her sister had stored her belongings and typed passages from journals and letters going back to high school. In November 2004 the Corries sent 184 pages to the Royal Court.

It had been the intention of the two collaborators, Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, a Guardian editor, to flesh out Rachel Corrie’s writings with others’ words. The pages instantly changed their minds. “We thought, She’s done it on her own. Rachel’s voice is the only voice you had to hear,” Viner says. The Corrie family, which holds the rights to the words, readily agreed. Rachel Corrie was the playwright. Any royalties would go to the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. The London “co-editors” then set to work winnowing the material, working with a slender blond actress, Megan Dodds, who resembles Corrie.

A year ago the play was staged as a one-woman show in a 100-seat theater at the Royal Court. The piece was critically celebrated, and the four-week run sold out. Young people especially were drawn to the show.

My Name Is Rachel Corrie–the title comes from a declaration in Corrie’s journal–is two things: the self-portrait of a sensitive woman struggling to find her purpose, and a polemic on the horrors of Israeli occupation.

The work is marked by Plath-like talk about boys–“Eventually I convinced Colin to quit drowning out my life”–and rilling passages about her growing understanding of commitment: “I knew a few years ago what the unbearable lightness of being was, before I read the book. The lightness between life and death, there are no dimensions at all…. It’s just a shrug, the difference between Hitler and my mother, the difference between Whitney Houston and a Russian mother watching her son fall through the sidewalk and boil to death…. And I knew back then that the shrug would happen at the end of my life–I knew. And I thought, so who cares?… Now I know, who cares…if I die at 11.15 p.m. or at 97 years–And I know it’s me. That’s my job…” As the work grinds toward death, Corrie’s moral vision of the Mideast becomes uppermost. “What we are paying for here is truly evil…. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me.”

The show returned last fall to a larger theater at the Royal Court, and sold out again. Most viewers tended to walk off afterward in stunned silence, but some nights the theater became a forum for discussions. Rickman or Viner or Dodds came out to talk about how the show had come about.

The Royal Court got bids from around the world, including a theater in Israel, seeking to stage the production. But the priority was to bring the show to “Rachel’s homeland,” as Elyse Dodgson, the theater’s international director, says. At bottom, Corrie’s story feels very American. It is filled with references that surely escaped its English audience–working at Mount Rainier, swimming naked in Puget Sound, drinking Mountain Dew, driving I-5 to California.

The New York Theatre Workshop agreed to stage the show in March 2006. But by January the Royal Court began to sense apprehension on the Workshop’s part. “I went to New York to meet them because I didn’t feel comfortable about what they were saying,” Dodgson says.

The Workshop was evidently spooked. Its artistic director, James Nicola, spoke of having discussions after every performance to “contextualize” the play, of hiring a consultant who had worked with Salman Rushdie to lead these discussions and of hiring Emily Mann, the artistic director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, to prepare a companion piece of testimonies that would include Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism.

“We’ve had some brilliant discussions, we told them, but the play speaks for itself,” Dodgson says. “It is expensive and unnecessary to have that after every single performance. Of course we knew some of the hideous things that were said about Rachel. We took no notice of them. The controversy died when people saw that this was a play about a young woman, an idealist.”

Dodgson was further upset when a Workshop marketing staffer, whom she won’t name, used the word “mollifying.” “It was a very awkward conversation. He said, ‘I can’t find the right word, but “mollifying” the Jewish community.’ It shocked me.”

Corrie’s connection to the International Solidarity Movement was politically loaded. The ISM is committed to nonviolence, but it works with a broad range of organizations, from Israeli peace activists to Palestinian groups that have supported suicide bombings, which has been seized on by those who want it to get lost.

At the heart of the disagreement was an insistence by supporters of Israel that Corrie’s killing be presented in the context of Palestinian terror. And that specifically, the policy of destroying Palestinian homes in Gaza be shown to be aimed at those tunnels–even though the pharmacist’s house Corrie was shielding was hundreds of yards from the border and had nothing to do with tunnels. One person close to NYTW, who refused to go on the record, elaborates: “The fact that the Israelis and such were trying to bulldoze these houses was not due to the fact that they were just against the Palestinians, but the underground tunnels, ways to get explosives to this community. By not mentioning it, the play was not as evenhanded as it claims to be.” Another anonymous NYTW source said that staffers became worried after reading a fall 2003 Mother Jones profile of Corrie, a much disputed piece that relied heavily on right-wing sources to paint her as a reckless naif.

Just whom was the Workshop consulting in its deliberations? It has steadfastly refused to say. In the New York Observer, Nicola mentioned “Jewish friends.” Dodgson says that in discussions with the Royal Court, Workshop staffers brought up the Anti-Defamation League and the mayor’s office as entities they were concerned about. (Abe Foxman of the ADL visited London in 2005 and denounced the play in the New York Sun as offensive to Jewish “sensitivities.”) By one account, the fatal blow was dealt when the global PR firm Ruder Finn (which has an office in Israel) said it couldn’t represent the play.

In its latest statement, the Workshop says it consulted many community voices, not only Jews. These did not include Arab-Americans. Najla Said, the artistic director of Nibras, an Arab-American theater in New York, says, “We’re not even ‘other’ enough to be ‘other.’ We’re not the political issue that anyone thinks is worth talking about.”

The run had been scheduled for March 22-May 14. Tickets were listed on Telecharge in February. But the Workshop had not announced the production. According to the Royal Court, Nicola at last told them he wanted to postpone the play at least six months or a year to allow the political climate to settle down and to better prepare the production. The Royal Court took this as a cancellation. The news broke on February 28 in the Guardian and the New York Times.

The Times article was shocking. It said the Workshop had “delayed” a production it had never announced, and reported that Nicola had been “polling local Jewish religious and community leaders as to their feelings.” Nicola was quoted saying that Hamas’s victory had made the Jewish community “very defensive and very edgy…and that seemed reasonable to me.”

The Red Sea parted. Or anyway the Atlantic Ocean. The English playwright Caryl Churchill, who has worked with both theaters, condemned the decision. Vanessa Redgrave wrote a letter urging the Royal Court to sue the Workshop. At first, the New York theater community was quiet.

Enter the blogosphere, stage left. Three or four outraged theater bloggers began peppering the Workshop’s community with questions. Whom did the Workshop talk to? Why aren’t theater people up in arms? Garrett Eisler, the blogger Playgoer, likened the decision to one by the Manhattan Theater Club to cancel its 1998 production of Corpus Christi, a play imagining Christ as a gay man–a decision that was reversed after leading voices, including the Times editorial page, denounced the action.

The playwright Jason Grote circulated a petition calling on the Workshop to reverse itself. Signers included Philip Munger, a composer whose cantata dedicated to Corrie, The Skies Are Weeping, also had experienced politically motivated cancellations. The young playwright Christopher Shinn spoke out early and forcefully, saying the postponement amounted to censorship. “No one with a name was saying anything,” says Eisler. “And Chris Shinn is not that big a name, but he is a practicing theater artist whose name gets in the New York Times.”

By the time I visited the Workshop, a week into the controversy, it was a wounded institution. Linda Chapman, the associate artistic director, who had signed Grote’s petition, said she couldn’t talk to me, because of the “quicksand” that any statement had become. The Workshop had posted and then removed from its website a clumsy statement aimed at explaining itself. Playgoer was demanding that the opponents of the play come forward and drumming for a declaration from Tony Kushner, who has staged plays at the Workshop, posting his photo as if he were some war criminal.

In an interview with The Nation, Kushner said that he was quiet because of his exhaustion over similar arguments surrounding the film Munich, on which he was a screenwriter, and because he kept hoping the decision would be made right. He said Nicola is a great figure in American theater: “His is one of the one or two most important theaters in this area–politically engaged, unapologetic, unafraid and formally experimental.” Never having gotten a clear answer about why Nicola put off the play, Kushner ascribes it to panic: Nicola didn’t know what he was getting into, and only later became aware of how much opposition there was to Corrie, how much confusion the right has created around the facts. Nicola felt he was taking on “a really big, scary brawl and not a play.” Still, Kushner said, the theater’s decision created a “ghastly” situation. “Censoring a play because it addresses Palestinian-Israeli issues is not in any way right,” he said.

The Royal Court came out smelling like a rose. It triumphantly announced that it was moving the Megan Dodds show to the West End, the London equivalent of Broadway, and that it couldn’t come to New York till next fall.

The Grote petitioners (519 and counting) want that to happen at the Workshop, which itself was reaching out with another statement on the matter, released on the eve of the anniversary of Corrie’s death. “I can only say we were trying to do whatever we could to help Rachel’s voice be heard,” Nicola said. The cut may be too deep for such ointment. As George Hunka, author of the theater blog Superfluities, says, “This is far too important an issue for everyone to paper it over again, with everyone shaking hands for a New York Times photographer. It’s an extraordinarily rare picture of the ways that New York cultural institutions make their decisions about what to produce.”

Hunka doesn’t use the J-word. Jen Marlowe does. A Jewish activist with Rachelswords.org (which is staging a reading of Corrie’s words on March 22 with the Corrie parents present), she says, “I don’t want to say the Jewish community is monolithic. It isn’t. But among many American Jews who are very progressive and fight deeply for many social justice issues, there’s a knee-jerk reflexive reaction that happens around issues related to Israel.”

Questions about pressure from Jewish leaders morph quickly into questions about funding. Ellen Stewart, the legendary director of the theatrical group La MaMa E.T.C., which is across East 4th Street from the Workshop, speculates that the trouble began with its “very affluent” board. Rachel’s father, Craig Corrie, echoes her. “Do an investigation, follow the money.” I called six board members and got no response. (About a third appear to be Jewish, as am I.) This is of course a charged issue. The writer Alisa Solomon, who was appalled by the postponement, nonetheless warns, “There’s something a little too familiar about the image of Jews pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes.”

Perhaps. But Nicola’s statement about a back channel to Jewish leaders suggests the presence of a cultural lobby that parallels the vaunted pro-Israel lobby in think tanks and Congress. I doubt we will find out whether the Workshop’s decision was “internally generated,” as Kushner contends, or more orchestrated, as I suspect. What the episode has demonstrated is a climate of fear. Not of physical harm, but of loss of opportunities. “The silence results from fear and intimidation,” says Cindy Corrie. “I don’t see what else. And it harms not only Palestinians. I believe, from the bottom of my heart, it harms Israelis and it harms us.”

Kushner agrees. Having spent five months defending Munich, he says the fear has two sources: “There is a very, very highly organized attack machinery that will come after you if you express any kind of dissent about Israel’s policies, and it’s a very unpleasant experience to be in the cross hairs. These aren’t hayseeds from Kansas screaming about gays burning in hell; they’re newspaper columnists who are taken seriously.” These attackers impose a kind of literacy test: Before you can cast a moral vote on Palestinian rights, you must be able to recite a million wonky facts, such as what percentage of the territories were outside the Green Line in 1949. Then there is the self-generated fear of lending support to anti-Semites or those who would destroy Israel. All in all, says Kushner, it can leave someone “overwhelmed and in despair–you feel like you should just say nothing.”

Who will tell Americans the Middle East story? For generations that story has been one of Israelis as victims, and it has been crucial to Israeli policy inasmuch as Israel has been able to defy its neighbors’ opinions by relying on a highly sympathetic superpower. Israel’s supporters have always feared that if Americans started to conduct the same frank discussion of issues that takes place in Tel Aviv, we might become more evenhanded in our approach to the Middle East. That pressure is what has stifled a play that portrays the Palestinians as victims (and thrown a blanket over a movie, Munich, that portrays both sides as victims). I’ve never written this sort of thing before. How moving that we have been granted that freedom by a 23-year-old woman with literary gifts who was not given time to unpack them.n

You would hope that the passage of fifty years might have cleared the passions that once inflamed the Rosenberg case. The end of the cold war has cooled the ideological battles, and many of the factual questions that once divided the parties seem to have been resolved. Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet spy; the evidence against Ethel was flimsy; judge and prosecutor were overzealous and broke the law themselves. So now maybe the personal issues at the center of the dramatic case might be examined.

This is the task that Robert Meeropol, the younger of the Rosenbergs’ two sons, has taken on in his earnest memoir, An Execution in the Family, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the execution. His subject is his parents’ political and psychological legacy, and his efforts to come to terms with it. The writer’s manner and position at once command sympathy and respect. For Meeropol has led a worthy life, now as the head of a foundation, called the Rosenberg Fund for Children, that helps children of activists who have been targeted by the law. A man who loves the company of children and mistrusts the state has found the right job.

It wasn’t easy getting there.

He was 3 and his brother 7 when their parents were jailed in 1950. The Rosenbergs’ extended family shunned the boys, and they spent months in a shelter before landing in the upper Manhattan home of Abel and Anne Meeropol, who were members of the Rosenbergs’ Old Left community. The Meeropols adopted the boys and brought them up in a loving and generous way. As a youth, Robert Meeropol says, he faced two great challenges. One was being identified as a Rosenberg son, something that could destroy his privacy and deeply complicate his life. He deceived even close friends till his mid-20s, when he joined a lawsuit against the author Louis Nizer over Nizer’s use of Rosenberg letters in a book on the case. On June 19, 1973, the twentieth anniversary of their parents’ deaths, Robert and Michael Meeropol identified themselves publicly.

The other challenge was political. All four of his parents were Old Leftists, Abel Meeropol so die-hard he was unfazed by revelations of Stalin’s crimes. “I sprang from that party-line tradition,” Robert writes. Yet he also rebelled against that tradition, with its emphasis on disciplined, peaceful organizing among the working class, gravitating toward the revolutionary spontaneity of the New Left. In the late 1960s he took part in militant actions at the University of Michigan. Abel Meeropol was fearful about the risks Robert was taking. “I’m afraid I’ll never see you again,” he said, and before long the author, by then married and forming a very stable family of his own, came to share his fear. In the end he chose to continue his radical political activities, but in a legal way. “My childhood experience had fostered a political ethic that was at the core of my being…. I needed to be a troublemaker.”

This book, however, is subtitled “One Son’s Journey,” and the deeper quest here is of a psychological and spiritual character. Perhaps inevitably, Robert and Michael Meeropol became heirs to their parents’ effort to establish their innocence. In 1975 the boys published the book We Are Your Sons, combining their own stories with excerpts of their parents’ jailhouse letters, and asserting that the Rosenbergs had been framed because their radical political beliefs had elicited McCarthyite hysteria. For a time, Robert gave public lectures demolishing the government’s evidence point by point.

But by 1988, Meeropol writes, the murmurings of older allies of his parents brought him to understand that his father was guilty of some form of espionage, just not what Julius and Ethel were convicted of. “My new position was uncertain and complicated,” he writes. He stopped giving lectures. “As long as I remained in the background, I would not have to voice my doubts about my parents’ case publicly, and I could develop a life that moved beyond being their son.”

The end of the cold war brought new information. Former Soviet agents said that Julius, an electrical engineer formerly in the Army Signal Corps, was an asset, and the American government released National Security Agency files of decoded Soviet cables showing that Julius had been a spy, using the code name Antenna and providing the Soviets with military secrets.

It would be hard to imagine a more deeply moving story about a son losing his blindness about his parents. Yet An Execution in the Family describes that territory without fully exploring it. The idea of a memoir as a “journey” owes something to various 1990s experiments in freeing unconscious pain, but Meeropol’s writerly training is as a foundation executive, and his descriptions of his inner life often sound programmatic. The childhood nightmare would seem to have cauterized him. “I can’t remember ever crying about their executions as a child…. I never cried about anything,” he says, and his future wife almost abandoned their relationship because of its “emotional poverty.” A reader undergoes similar privations here.

I should have liked the author to have taken greater risks. For instance, he might have revisited Sing Sing, the scene of his parents’ last years and death, to try to uncover his childhood feelings. In The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow’s 1971 novel that is told by the son of the “Isaacsons,” the narrator says, “I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution,” before a horrifying description of that scene. I never need to read that again, but I would like to know what Meeropol thinks about when he thinks about his parents’ death.

As it is, the only primal screams here are directed at Meeropol’s uncle, David Greenglass, a confessed spy inside Los Alamos, whose testimony that his sister and brother-in-law were co-conspirators helped send them to the chair. Even hearing about Greenglass, Meeropol says, “is like taking a bath in sewage.” He elaborates: “Sometimes religious Jews mourn the ‘death’ of someone who has committed an unforgivable act, going so far as to sit shiva for him. What Greenglass did is unforgivable, and I’ve removed him from my life with similar finality.”

The reader wishes he had overcome those feelings. Elsewhere in this book, in making a persuasive argument against the death penalty, Meeropol says that the rage felt by the victims’ families can be lanced by reconciliation rituals in which killers express remorse. I hope that he is right. But, fifty years later, he is still in too much pain to contemplate reconciliation with the uncle he has condemned to spiritual death (and don’t let anyone tell you Jewish voodoo doesn’t work).

What if he had approached Greenglass, and tested his belief in our “common humanity” by at least attempting to remove the labels of Wretched and Righteous that are worn by Greenglass and himself? In the process he might have reached a deeper understanding of who his parents were.

Julius and Ethel are the missing characters in this book. Such vivid and astonishing characters they were, too! Julius the sliest and ballsiest Jew ever to walk Delancey Street, sending his wife a note to say “Honey we have a license and we should be allowed to set up housekeeping” in the Death House together. Ethel with her thumpingly grandiose literary style and brand loyalty to Commissary cream cheese behind bars. Ethel emerged as sexy and neurotic in Ethel, a 1990 novel by Tema Nason, but here she remains an abstraction, and this speaks to the largest problem in Meeropol’s book, and maybe also in the case as it echoes today.

Yes, the government was perfidious. There were unethical meetings among judges and prosecutors, who were rattled by all sorts of fevers, from 1950s anti-Communism to the assimilationist desire of professional Jews to demonstrate their loyalty by publicly sacrificing two of their radical working-class brethren. The Rosenbergs are the only people in American history who’ve been executed for spying. Others found guilty of similar crimes drew far lighter sentences.

But those are old stories. This year the fiftieth anniversaries of the scaling of Everest and the discovery of the double helix seem far more relevant to our lives than poor Julius and Ethel’s belief in the triumph of the proletariat–even with John Ashcroft running the Justice Department. And yet a very contemporary issue does throb inside this book: Can the Rosenbergs’ son criticize his parents?

The Rosenbergs did what most parents do: They lied to their kids about who they were. Had they been permitted to live to a mature age, maybe they would have come clean. As it was, their martyrdom has functioned as a kind of psychic amber for their children’s thinking. However heroic they were to refuse to cooperate with the Feds and thereby accept their fate, however much that bravery resonates in their sons’ political choices, the Rosenberg children have struggled with those lies for a great part of their lives.

It is stunning to consider that Meeropol was 28 when he wrote rather edgily, along with his brother, in the book We Are Your Sons: “Recent investigations have permitted us to conclude that our parents probably were members of the American Communist Party.”

Did their parents owe them greater sincerity about such a basic question? Even sealed sincerity? Even the convict Abel Magwitch managed to be more honest with his heir, Pip, in Great Expectations.

Robert Meeropol circles the matter restlessly. At a gathering he organizes of the children of political prisoners, a child asks Meeropol why he is not angrier. He thinks she means angrier at the state, and explains that he has gotten over his murderous feelings toward the people who killed his parents.

Then he realizes, “She meant, ‘Why wasn’t I angry with my parents for the choices they had made?'”

But he quickly rationalizes the issue:

“I am proud of my parents even if they may not have been unequivocally innocent. They acted with integrity, courage, and in furtherance of righteous ideals.”

That’s not really an answer, it’s political speech. At some level, Robert Meeropol still seems to retain a 6-year-old’s idealization of his parents.

Who were these people? What combination of ideology and fortitude made the spy and his helpmate maintain their silence? By some abridgment of that silence, could the couple have saved Ethel’s life?

Meeropol doesn’t ask that question (and condemns Ethel’s mother, Tessie, for venturing such issues in a famous visit to Ethel). He has declined one of the gifts of the journeying age: We’re permitted to rage at our parents and thereby come to terms with the emotional damage they created in our lives. The sensitive are compelled to do so, to work their way through to fuller expression.

Of course, Robert Meeropol didn’t actually decline that gift; the state denied it to him. And in this sense, the son’s long struggles add weight to the lesson offered long ago by the bigger controversies of the case: The death penalty only sows confusion.