, Peter Beinart is an ideas man and an important voice shaping American foreign-policy debate. A onetime hawk who ardently supported the Iraq war, Beinart began moderating his views after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the difficulties of the occupation, ultimately admitting that

of enabling Israel's moral decline. In turn, he has earned a reputation as "U.S. Jewry's enfant terrible," according to the Israeli daily Haaretz. Beinart recently launched a group blog at the Daily Beast called Open Zion, which is devoted to "Israel, Palestine, and the Jewish future." He was one of a

s or Palestinian terror groups but the American Jewish establishment — presented here as a monolithic cartel of powerful groups and individuals who Beinart tells us have closed their eyes to the disintegration of Israel's higher ideals while lobbying Congress and the administration for whatever their b

publication. It is also unusual because it offers little in the way of personal reporting on the Israelis or the Palestinians themselves. Instead, Beinart's book is mainly about the response to this searing and seemingly intractable conflict among American Jews, who, though living far from the dusty b

nd established ethnocracy that thinks of itself as a permanent frontier. In 1980, twelve thousand Jews lived in the West Bank, "east of democracy," Beinart writes; now they number more than three hundred thousand, and include Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's wildly xenophobic Foreign Minister. Lieberman has

-29, 33, 42, 85, 233, 240 Bartiromo, Maria, 205 Bass, Edward, 56 Bayrock Group, 100-102 Bedminster Golf Club, 165, 213-14, 216, 287-94, 297, 302, 307 Beinart, Peter, 297 Benghazi, 97 Berkowitz, Avi, 143 Berlusconi, Silvio, 100 Berman, Mark, 78 Best and the Brightest, The (Halberstam), 53-54 Bezos, Jeff, 35