Harold Meyerson has an excellent column in today’s Washington Post about Barack Obama’s drive for a two-state solution and the growing gaps between Jewish American public opinion and the policies of the Israeli government. He observes that “American Jews remain intensely committed to liberalism and to universal and minority rights,” ideas that used to accord strongly with support for Israel—a bastion of liberalism, born out of the Holocaust and surrounded by seemingly powerful states bent on its destruction. More recently, however, “42 years of occupation have rendered Israel a state that tests those values more than it affirms them.”

I think this is all correct, as are the things Meyerson says about J Street and everything Henrick Hertzberg says here. But I do think there’s one other dynamic that often gets missed here, namely the extent to which the mainstream “pro-Israel” organizations in the United States found themselves becoming more ideological—and more fundamentally right-wing—in recent years.

I was talking to a student of US foreign policy recently who was telling me that Lyndon Johnson used to complain about Jewish groups’ take on foreign policy. Basically, he characterized them as wanting him to send the 6th Fleet to the Gulf of Aqaba while refusing to send as much as a screwdriver to Vietnam. To Johnson that was incoherent, but it was basically just “Jews are liberal” plus parochial ethnic politics—Israel is full of Jews. What’s emerged in more recent years is a view of what “pro-Israel” politics are that makes more logical sense, but is, in practice, less appealing. But neoconservative intellectuals—many of them Jewish, and several of them hailing from Canada where Jews are traditionally on the political right—helped articulate a coherent worldview in which American support for an aggressive Israel was of a piece with a generally imperial view of America’s role in the world. Bill Kristol, David Frum, and Charles Krauthammer want to send the 6th Fleet to the Gulf of Aqaba and basically always want to send some fleet somewhere to bomb someone. Especially when, post-9/11, issues related to the entire “greater middle east” moved closer to the center of what Americans argue about, this tended to increasingly encourage everyone to adopt a more coherent view of the overall situation. Liberals, Jewish or otherwise, tend to generally take a dovish view of things and as conservatives started to draw explicit links between taking a hawkish view of Israel and a hawkish view of Iraq, North Korea, and all the rest, I think that tended to push liberal Jews toward taking a more skeptical view of Israel hawks’ arguments.

Jon Chait observes that “For a revolution to succeed, it generally needs one of two things to happen: Either it needs its own weapons, or it needs mass defections by the state security forces.” He also sees some evidence that some elements of the security forces may be contemplating defection.

I think it’s worth emphasizing that in the modern world at least, the balance is tipped pretty overwhelmingly to security service defection rather than actual armed overthrow of the powers that be. The reality is that modern military technology makes it extraordinarily difficult to actually defeat a state on the battlefield. An dissident movement just isn’t going to be able to be able to blow up tanks and airplanes. Under the circumstances, strategic nonviolence is a vital tactic. If you were to try to fight the security forces—shoot some policemen, say—you’d encourage a more serious crackdown. It’s through nonviolent resistance that you heighten the psychological contradictions, and encourage the regime and its enforcers to blink. From the Velvet Revolution to Tiananmen Square to the Orange Revolution to what’s happening today in Iran, the brave dissidents are essentially daring the security forces to beat or kill them. The bet is that when push comes to shove, people in the Iranian security forces have some humane and patriotic instincts and will recoil from the idea of using mass violence against their fellow citizens. And it’s a terrifying bet. We’ve seen time and again that it’s a bet that often pays off, but as we learned in China 20 years ago there are no guarantees.

The idea of creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency struck me at first glance as probably something that was probably a good idea, but didn’t necessarily have a ton of awesome potential. It is, however, attracting some appealing adversaries. First the Financial Services Roundtable took a swing at it and now the Chamber of Commerce is getting into the action. That, to me, makes it sound like this might be a bigger deal than I was initially giving it credit for. Now the key thing is whether congress can enact this idea in a way that has some teeth.

Pat Garofalo offers some specifics:

That said, the agency will only be effective if it’s on par with the banking regulators and can keep up with financial innovation. It can’t be second tier, without enough resources or stature to do its job effectively. The administration’s plan calls for “stable, robust funding,” and giving the agency “sole rule making authority” in terms of consumer protection. We’ll see if Congress decides to grant those requests.

Is there a name for the phenomenon where a group signing up to oppose something makes you more enthusiastic about it?