Eminent political philosopher Michael Walzer says what I’ve been saying about the flotilla, Israeli public opinion and the conduct of states:
Walzer repeatedly appeals to Israelis – both the citizen committed to a shared social project and the sovereign committed to high-level international politics. “I think the sense that people have been expressing in the last few days – that ‘the whole the world is against us’ – that is not the perception, not the standpoint of the citizens of a sovereign state,” he says. “That is the galut (diaspora) mentality and you don’t need that. You have friends in the world. You have strategic allies that are not quite friends, like Egypt, and you have real friends like the United States, and you need to behave in a way that builds on that friendship.“
…
In the meantime, says Walzer, Israel’s conduct is damaging its relations with the Jewish community in the United States: “The crucial problem for Zionists in America is the problem described very well by Peter Beinart in the New York Review [of Books] – that as Israeli politics has moved to the right, there has been an alienation of many liberal Reform and Conservative Jews and also unaffiliated Jews so that if you went to the Israel Day parade in New York just a week ago, you would have found that 70 percent of the people there were Orthodox and that comes from just 10 percent of the American Jewish population. So there is a process of alienation, which I think is dangerous for Israel and it does have something to do with the absence of institutions representing center and left Israeli politics in the United States. I think Beinart is right, that American Jewish leaders have fallen into a mode of defensiveness and apology that doesn’t resonate with younger liberal Jews.“
Emphases mine. Full article at Haaretz.