[I]t's not just Israel's policies toward the Palestinians that have eroded Americans' good will toward Israel. Perhaps as important has been Israel's role in American politics ... . Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters. As Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, told me, "When you end up using antisemitism as a pretext for kicking kids out of universities and out of the country, and you use it as a pretext for ending cancer research and use it as a pretext for undercutting the First Amendment, you're going to get some blowback against the people doing that."
