bayat

“Maybe I’ll start here. I think something we’re seeing in the politics in America around Israel right now, I think it reflects three generations with very different lived experiences of what Israel is. You have older Americans, say, Joe Biden, who saw Israel as the haven for the Jews and who also saw Israel when it was weak and small, when it really could have been wiped off the map by its neighbors.”

“We also knew an Israel that was an occupying force, a country that could and did impose its will on Palestinians, and I don’t want to be euphemistic about this, an Israel in which Palestinians were an oppressed class, where their lives and their security and their freedom were worth less. But we also knew an Israel that had a strong peace movement, where the moral horror of that occupation was widely recognized. We knew an Israel where the leaders were trying imperfectly, but seriously and continuously, to become something better, to become something different, to become in the eyes of the world what Israel was in its own eyes, a Jewish state, but a humane and moral one.”

“And so now you have this generation, the one coming of age now, the one that has only known this Israel, Netanyahu’s Israel, Ben-Gvir’s Israel.”

“There is this Pew survey in 2022 that I find really telling. It found that 69 percent of Americans over age 65 had a favorable view of Israel, but among Americans between ages 18 and 29, young Americans, 56 percent had an unfavorable view. As it happens, American politics right now is dominated by people over 65, but it won’t be forever”

“And there are many of us who warned of this exact thing happening, who said, if you lose moral legitimacy, you will not have the world’s good will when you need it most, who said it is a problem for the Jewish state to not be seen, to not be a moral state.”