Ezra Klein reacts to Peter Beinart’s essay on the decline of liberal Zionism with the following observation:

[T]he real dividing line was not sympathy for the Palestinians or support for Israel, but whether you fundamentally understood Israel to be the most powerful country in the Middle East and the stronger party in the struggle with the Palestinians or whether you understood Israel to be a small and threatened nation that was locked in a war for its survival with a powerful enemy.

From a 30,000-foot perspective, I think that’s true. And it’s one of the reasons why the associative reasoning so often on display in this debate too-frequently bogs down in unproductive assertions of Grand Historical Blame for the Israeli-Palestinian debate. But Ezra’s insight is more often applicable to those taking a basic position on the conflict than it is to those who concern themselves with the next question: what is it that Israel ought to do? I’ll just focus on the Jewish side of the ledger here.

And there, the critical divide doesn’t concern who’s the stronger power and who’s the weaker power. It’s about which threat Israel confronts is the actual existential threat — the one that will fundamentally shape Israel’s continued survival and its place in the world. In the actually-existent 2010-era debate, it’s a choice between whether you think a nuclear Iran is an existential threat or a binational state is an existential threat. It’s perfectly possible to believe both, as an intellectual proposition, but I don’t know anyone who really does, and if they’re out there, they’re not really shaping strategy in Jerusalem or in Washington.

Everything follows from the answer to this question. If Iran obtains a nuclear weapon and your read of Iran is that it’ll deliver that weapon to detonate in an extremely densely-packed country of 7 million people, then you’re going to urge that Israeli and U.S. strategy gear itself around preventing that challenge, with other concerns subordinated. If you believe that the maintenance of the status quo, with the West Bank under Israeli occupation, means that demographic realities will force Israel to choose between a Jewish state and a democratic state, and that such a choice will represent a new era in what it is Israel is, then you’re going to urge that Israeli and U.S. strategy gear itself around preventing that choice from emerging, with other concerns subordinated. You can tack on other concerns — the impact of either conflict with Iran or a prolonged Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflict on U.S. interests, for instance — and prioritizing one situation over the other doesn’t mean you’re disinterested in the other situation. But if you’re thinking these issues through and using your answers to mold the strategy you believe Israel and the U.S. ought to adopt, these, functionally, are your options.

Perhaps the cardinal weakness of the liberal Zionist position in 2010 is that its answer is that the abandonment of Jewish democracy is the existential threat Israel faces, and its concern is fundamentally a parochial one. Right-wing Jews and left-wing Jews and right-wing evangelical Christians and Republican politicians and so forth in the U.S. and Israel, as a practical matter, can fairly easily coalesce around confronting Iran. But the coalition of people who care about Jewish democracy is basically limited to liberal Jewish Zionists. I don’t expect non-Jewish liberals to care about Israel remaining democratic or remaining Jewish if the bottom line is that Israel, left unimpeded, will abandon liberal values. You might find some really kindhearted souls who do care. But there probably ain’t that many of them. And there will be, I predict, even fewer if this awful reality actually manifests.

That’s, at bottom, the burden of liberal Jewish Zionism in 2010. In my darker moods, I fear that it either experiences a resurgence in the next five years or it dies forever. And I would submit, as a liberal Jewish Zionist, that if it dies, then the dream of Zionism — a homeland for the Jews in our ancestral homeland, living in peace with its neighbors, a nation like all other nations — dies with it.

(Not to step on my melodramatic ending, but Tablet has a Q&A with Peter that gets at his motivations here. It makes me sigh that their dek is about the CRUCIAL CRUCIAL CRUCIAL question of where his essay appears, but in fairness, it’s at the very least micronews and I might very well have made the same placement choice if I was in Tablet’s position.)

Update, 4:01 p.m.: My friend Ben Adler reminds me that I do know someone who views both Iran and indefinite West Bank occupation as existential threats: him. It turns out we’re closer in our perspectives than all that, since what I meant to say — and hope I said clearly enough, but maybe not — is that this is a question of prioritization. But maybe I should have been clearer about that.