The diminishing bond between secular American Jews and the state of Israel was more or less inevitable, no matter what policies were pursued in Israel and what kind of attitudes American Zionist organizations struck. Benjamin Netanyahu and Abe Foxman may have accelerated the process, but it’s hard to imagine that the more secular, more assimilated sections of the Jewish-American population wouldn’t have eventually drifted away from an intense connection with Israel anyway, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that Italian-Americans are less attached to both Italy and Catholicism than they were in 1940 or so, or that Irish-American are far less interested in the politics of Eire and Northern Ireland than they used to be.

I respectfully disagree with the author when he says "... the Jews are a nation as well as a religion." 

I suggest Israel is a Nation, Jewish is the State Religion of Israel. Zionists have aspirations of extending the boundaries of Israel, to "Biblical Israel", which as a minimum includes all lands between the Nile and the Euphrates, more ambitious territorial interpretation/aspirations, to  the very radical interpretation "wherever a Jew sets foot", which means World Domination. 

Peter Beinart has a long, instantly-controversial essay in the New York Review of Books arguing that younger, liberal, secular American Jews are becoming ever-more-alienated from Israel and Zionism, and castigating the mainstream American Zionist organizations for failing to come to grips with the Israeli government’s recent illiberal turn. Here’s his central claim:
Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster" indeed, have actively opposed" a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
I will leave the debate over the justice of Beinart’s portrait of both Israel and its American supporters to his fellow anguished liberal Zionists, Jeffrey Goldberg and Jonathan Chait. What I wonder is whether the trend that Beinart describes " the diminishing bond between secular American Jews and the state of Israel" was more or less inevitable, no matter what policies were pursued in Israel and what kind of attitudes American Zionist organizations struck. Benjamin Netanyahu and Abe Foxman may have accelerated the process, but it’s hard to imagine that the more secular, more assimilated sections of the Jewish-American population wouldn’t have eventually drifted away from an intense connection with Israel anyway, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that Italian-Americans are less attached to both Italy and Catholicism than they were in 1940 or so, or that Irish-American are far less interested in the politics of Eire and Northern Ireland than they used to be.
Yes, Jewish identity is far stronger and "stickier"  (clicqish) than most other ethno-religious ties. But that doesn’t mean that liberal Jews are immune to the impact of secularization and intermarriage, or that what we think of today as secular Judaism won’t eventually melt away into something that’s basically post-Jewish. As First Things’s David Goldman notes, responding to Beinart:
… [the essay] offers a condescending glance at the "warmth" and "learning" of Orthodox Jews, but neglects to mention the most startling factoid in Jewish demographics: a third of Jews aged 18 to 34 self-identify as Orthodox. "Secular Jew" is not quite an oxymoron "the Jews are a nation as well as a religion" but in the United States, at least, secular Jews have a fertility barely above 1 and an intermarriage rate of 50 percent, which means their numbers will decline by 75 percent per generation. It is tragic that the Jewish people stand to lose such a large proportion of their numbers, but they are lost to Judaism in general, not only to Zionism. That puts a different light on the matter.
After Elena Kagan’s nomination, Philip Weiss wrote a piece arguing that "Jews are the new WASPs," in the sense of being at once fully integrated into the American establishment and overrepresented within its highest echelons.  If there’s an unspoken fear haunting Beinart’s piece, I think, it’s that this comparison is all-too-apt - that liberal Jews are (very gradually) following the same trajectory as liberal Episcopalians before them, keeping their politics but surrendering their distinctive cultural and religious identity, and that the demise of liberal Zionism says something, not only about the fate of Israel, but about the fate of secular Judaism in the United States. One reason, and perhaps the major reason, that young liberal Jews are less attached to Israel is that Israel has become less liberal. But they also may be less attached to the Jewish homeland because they themselves are simply less Jewish.

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/
18/the-crisis-of-liberal-zionism/

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