I have a few quick points in response to Jeremy Ben-Ami's posting in which he argued (in response to me) that "a large majority of the American Jewish community does support active diplomacy, a two-state solution and an end to the occupation."

First, I have great respect for the efforts that Ben-Ami, Daniel Levy, M.J. Rosenberg, and other like-minded individuals have made to organize and mobilize American Jews to get firmly and enthusiastically behind a two-state solution.

Second, I have long been aware that there are marked differences between the rank and file of the American Jewish community and most of its leaders regarding how to think about dealing with the Palestinians. I understand that the leadership is clearly more hard-line than the rank and file and that most leaders have little if any enthusiasm for a two-state solution. Steve Walt and I wrote about this in our book on the Israel lobby.

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Avraham Burg obviously believes that the occupation has had a deeply corrupting effect on Israel. But there is something else going on inside Israel that worries him greatly: the changing nature of that society. He says, for example, that "Israeli society is split to its core," and although he does not detail the specifics of that divide, it is apparent that it has a political and a religious dimension. He believes that the political center of gravity in Israel has shifted markedly to the right. Indeed, he believes that the left has "decreased in numbers and become marginal." He also sees the balance between secular and religious Israelis shifting in favor of the latter, which is why he writes that "the establishment of a state run by rabbis and generals is not an impossible nightmare."

I would like to try to buttress Burg's analysis by pointing out some trends in Israeli society that are having and will continue to have a profound effect on the Jewish state over time, but which are hardly talked about in the mainstream media here in America. Specifically, I would like to focus on the growth of the ultra-Orthodox or Haredi in Israel, and emigration out of Israel, or what one might call "reverse Aliyah."

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The discussion taking place in this cafe is one of the most qualitative I ever had. As I carefully read everyone's comments I realize how much you can learn from people if you are willing to listen.

Many of you raise the Palestinian question. No doubt this is a very important subject for us Israelis, for Palestinians and for the entire world. But they do not play a major role in my current book. In part because I wrote a great deal about this conflict in my last book, God is Back, and in part because I believe this issue is primarily about us Israelis and our psychological mindset.

Daniel Levy compared me to Natan Sheranski. I do not know whether it is a compliment or a criticism. But there is something there. Sheranski became George W Bush's prophet. Tell me who your disciples are and I'll tell you who you are. There is nothing to add, given the last terrible 8 years. I'm ready for this challenge, ready to give it as much time as possible and as needed. As long as I know that I have real partners -- not just to talk the talk but to walk the walk.

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At the end of this discussion on Avraham Burg's book, The Holocaust is Over We Must Rise from the Ashes, we are reminded just how volatile the discussion is around Israel and its survival. We also see that so many want to have and participate in such a discussion. Still the situation remains.

In John Mearsheimer's posting, "Why Isn't Burg's Book a Bestseller?," he asks many pertinent questions about why this is. One referring to American Jews, "Why don't they see that Israel is in serious trouble and that the situation is likely to get worse, not better?" They are out there on 'J Street' as Jeremy Ben-Ami says and in Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, both definitely breaking ground. So the change is beginning and to Burg's credit, he is telling us that it is urgent.

Everyone must continue to talk and question. Without questioning, and looking at possibilities and opportunities, how do we change, evolve from violence or learn? How can policy be formed to help instead of hinder all of our interests? While we, in this case and as Burg says, help Israel move away from "serious trouble."

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John Mearsheimer asks why American Jews who feel a deep attachment to Israel don't see that it is "in Israel's interest and their own interest to champion a two-state solution".

I think the vast majority of American Jews do. As J Street's polling and others have shown, a large majority of the American Jewish community does support active diplomacy, a two-state solution and an end to the occupation. There is broad understanding among American Jews that a negotiated two-state peace agreement is critical to both Israeli security and American interests; in fact, 87 percent of American Jews believe that the U.S. should take an active role in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, according to our July 2008 poll.

The problem we face is that the loudest voices - a minority of the Jewish community - have been allowed to define what it means to be "pro-Israel." They've monopolized the debate in a manner that all who are posting here understand to be counterproductive to the interests of not only Israel, but the United States and, frankly, the American Jewish community.

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Patricia DeGennaro says in her most recent posting that the current situation between Israel and the Palestinians is "unsustainable." I believe she is correct, which prompts the obvious question: where is this conflict headed?

Avraham Burg clearly believes that Israel is headed for serious trouble. Ditto Ehud Olmert, who has said that if there is no two-state solution, Israel will "face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished." In other words, Israel will end up as an apartheid state if the Palestinians do not get a viable state of their own.

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Avraham Burg has urged me not to argue about Zionism but to talk about the future and what everyone can do. Nice. Last week Avraham said in New York that God made man out of polemics. Even nicer. And so today I'm going to argue more about Zionism.

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I am joining this late, and having read the previous posts and comments, I'm tempted to suggest that a more dissenting voice may be needed. I will not be that voice--my appreciation of the book The Holocaust is Over and its author are immense (even if I would take issue with points here and there and for instance critique Burg's suggestion of creating a "World Religion Organization"). But I not only share the central thread of Burg's critique of, as he calls it, "catastrophic Zionism", or the "imperial Israel of the Seventh Day" (i.e. what Israel became after the 1967 Six Day's War), I also consider the elaboration of this narrative and of the alternative to be both critical and urgent.

I have framed this post as Burg vs. Sharansky, partly because two of the most polemically delightful pages of this book are when Avrum is dissing the former refusenik-turned-"typical nationalist, chauvinist Israeli" and icon of Bush and the neocons, but mainly to suggest that Burg can be a central component of the intellectual antidote to Sharanskyism. If Sharansky's The Case for Democracy was required reading for the right and Bush's Whitehouse in their framing of the Middle East, then The Holocaust is Over can play a similar role for progressives.

Washington thinkers and policy-makers are spending a lot of time right now thinking through the mechanics of how to address the Bush-made (and Sharansky-made) mess in the Middle East--how to enhance stability, peace, and security. That's an interesting conversation and one that I often partake in, sometimes here at TPM Café--when and how to engage Iran or Syria; should an envoy get appointed; whether de-occupation or Palestinian institution-building come first; etc. But there is another conversation that needs to take place just as, if not more important, than process and mechanics. And that is the conceptual reframing of how we think about the Middle East, an intellectual counter-insurgency against the neocons and the Global War on Terror packaging which is still so ubiquitous.

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First I would like to respond to the comments and questions in regard to Senator Kennedy. Since the conversation was some time ago, I cannot, as you might imagine, recall exact words. However, his statements support Burg's analysis about how influential the idea of 'Shoah' is and how it has so deeply affected American rhetoric and its policies. As I write in my own article, "Debating the 'Lobby,'" "When it comes to the Middle East, U.S. lawmakers go out of their way to prioritize Israel's security concerns."

Kennedy's reasoning for not dealing with Russia was based on a restrictive trade agreement. In the 70s Russia put a tax on those emigrating, mostly Jews, because they claimed they wanted to stop the 'brain drain' exodus. The Russians got slapped with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which I see someone has mentioned, for Russia it is still in place. Upon hearing that, I learned about AIPAC as well and was astounded by how organized and influential 'The Israel Lobby' is inside the US Congress, which Drs. Mearsheimer and Walt explain so well in their book by the same name. I highly recommend it.

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John Mearsheimer writes, obviously in agreement:

His [Burg's] core message is that Israel is in serious trouble at home and there is good reason to think that things could go horribly wrong in the future. He emphasizes that Israel has changed greatly since 1948.

He quotes his mother on this point:

This country is not the country that we built. We founded a different country in 1948, but I don't know where it's disappeared."

That Israel has changed is inarguably true. Just watch this heart-stopping little film about the country, made by Air France in 1951. I'm not sure Israel has changed quite in the way Avrum and John imply: some big wrong turn after 1967. Tragedy does not usually result from suddenly doing the wrong thing but rather from doing the right thing too long.

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For American readers, the great virtue of Avraham Burg's important new book is that he says things about Israel and the Jewish people that are hardly ever heard in mainstream discourse in the United States. It is hard to believe how stunted and biased the coverage of Israel is in the American media, not to mention the extent to which our politicians have perfected the art of pandering to the Jewish state. The situation got so bad in the recent presidential campaign that journalists Jeffrey Goldberg and Shmuel Rosner -- both staunch defenders of Israel -- wrote pieces titled "Enough about Israel Already."

Let's hope that The Holocaust is Over is widely read and discussed, because it makes arguments that need to be heard and considered by Americans of all persuasions, but especially by those who feel a deep attachment to Israel. The fact that Burg wrote this book also matters greatly. He cannot be easily dismissed as a self-hating Jew or a crank, as he comes from a prominent Israeli family and has been deeply involved in mainstream Israeli politics for much of his adult life. Moreover, he clearly loves Israel.

Burg makes many smart points in his book, but I would like to focus on what I take to be his central arguments. His core message is that Israel is in serious trouble at home and there is good reason to think that things could go horribly wrong in the future. He emphasizes that Israel has changed greatly since 1948. He quotes his mother on this point: "This country is not the country that we built. We founded a different country in 1948, but I don't know where it's disappeared." Israel today, he writes, "is frighteningly similar to the countries we never wanted to resemble." Talking about Israel's shift to the right over time, he makes the eye-popping observation that "Jews and Israelis have become thugs."

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In reading Avrum Burg's book, I can't help but get a story torn from current events out of my mind-the terror attacks in Mumbai against the Chabad center there. Chabad is an outreach educational arm of the Lubavitcher hassidic movement, which is represented both in NY (a few blocks from me in Brooklyn) and in Israel, though they believe that Israel will not gain its full contemporary --statelike, not biblical--legitimacy until the messiah arrives.
And, while the Chabad rabbi and his wife got buried with state honors in ISrael (as I believe they should have since they appear to have been targeted as Jews) another victim's family refused to be buried with any symbols of the state, according to Israeli news reports.

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Avraham Burg's book is great and important, no doubt. His idea that Israel pardoned Germany too quickly and shifted the rage to Arabs is significant. His identification of the neocons as powerful Jewish proponents of the Iraq war is one that liberal American Jews have too long resisted. His impatience with Jewish ethnocentrism and his tolerance of intermarriage will also resonate. Jews will discuss this book for a long time. That's mostly a Jewish conversation.

Here's the American one. Last week in NY, Burg said that American Jews compose a "semi-autonomous" structure of Zionism, giving support to the Jewish state. I don't want that role, I never have. Douglas Feith and Elliott Abrams did, and look where our foreign policy is in the Middle East. Today Richard Falk, the special rapporteur for the UN in Gaza, states that the U.S. is complicit in Israel's "massive" violations of the Geneva Conventions that threaten wide famine and disease in the Palestinian population and that breed extremism. The international outrage over these conditions, Falk says, recalls the outrage over apartheid 20 years back. This is the true context for Burg's revelations; and yes the Obama train is leaving the station--which is to say that my country, having elected a black president, will be paying more attention, at last, to Israel's grievous and shocking treatment of a minority.

Avrum, you have opened such a critical conversation for the Jewish people with your writing and your thinking, not just in Israel but for American Jews as well. I thank you for that.

So much of our thinking about the world and about the future has become a hostage to our experiences of the past. If we remain captives to fear, obliged to view the world through the lens of past persecutions and horror, we will never adapt to the new realities of the present day and never be able to build a future of hope and optimism.

The election of Barack Obama has the potential to completely lead us to a future built on hope. Not only can the new President reestablish America as a pragmatic and positive player on the world stage, but he has the potential to help mobilize the international community to address the serious global challenges that lie ahead.

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It is with great honor that I join the conversation set forth here on TPMCafe by Avraham Burg. The Holocaust is Over: Let us rise from the Ashes is a courageous book that calls out for the healing of a people. For if one cannot be at peace with themselves how on earth can they be at peace with anyone else.

I learned about the struggles in the Middle East some twenty years ago while I was an intern in the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. As a budding national security scholar, I asked the good Senator why the US did not work closer with the Russians to contain nuclear weapons. His answer was not about nuclear weapons but Jewish emigration.

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Reading Avrum Burg's first post, and the comments following, it is difficult to know how to enter the conversation in a way that does not just excite over-exercised passions, or become an occasion to repeat all the things I (and others) have argued for during past months. So let me suggest a few questions:

1. Spinoza once wrote that peace is not the absence of violence but the presence of justice. Does experience of the holocaust, the trauma, not teach, among other things (more than other things), Spinoza's principle? And whose trauma, by the way? My dear friend, Ilona Karmel--a survivor of the Plashow death camp, who died eight years ago this week--used to scoff at young Israelis and American Jews who wanted to use her as a prop to preach Jewish exceptionalism. She was no easier on defenders of American military intervention abroad who saw Munich everywhere. "They have scars but no wounds," she said. By the way, Ilona also said, unforgettably, that there were times she "missed the camp": "Things were simple," she said, you could easily know good from evil, something she never experienced again.

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The last two weeks have been unbelievable. I have seen the world -- Jerusalem, Milan, New York, Munich, Washington. So far, everywhere I went I witnessed the same conversation. There is a feeling, in all of these places, that a train is about to depart from a station. In America, there is a feeling that President-elect Obama has put an end to so many years of discrimination and oppression and that America is going to depart toward a new, much better world. In Italy, as in Germany, they are discussing the present, but thinking about the past -- how best to depart from the miseries caused by the political regimes of the 20th century and toward an open, pluralistic society which contains the contemporary "other," the non-European elements of society.

Soon I will be on my way home, back to Israel, and I ask myself -- are we going to depart for somewhere or are we doomed to live in the past, with our ghosts, never to be redeemed? I don't believe in this attitude. I always believed in the future -- not to say that the past is not important or that forgiving means forgetting but that Israel must get out of the bunker of trauma and depart toward the safe haven of trust.

So I wrote a book that stirred up a lot of controversy. My argument is simple: very soon our children will live in a world without living witnesses of World War Two. The Holocaust will become a memory rather than an experience. How do we depart from experience to memory, from trauma to trust, from the past to the future? This is what I would like discuss with you all because, for me, the essence of this journey is to listen to other people's overt and covert experiences and attitudes and develop mine from them.