The working title of Peter Beinart’s forthcoming book, The Crisis in Liberal Zionism, puts it nicely in a nutshell.

The problem: how do American Jews, who are traditionally overwhelmingly liberal, respond to an Israel which is steadily growing more illiberal and increasingly inclined to pursue policies which many, including Mr. Beinart, believes to be morally indefensible?

Well, he says, right now, they tend to respond in a couple of unsatisfactory ways. Among older American Jews, the Orthodox and the established Jewish lobby groups, it is by ignoring the devolution of Israeli democracy, by what he has previously called “checking their liberalism at the door” when it comes to Israel. And among younger Jews, the non-Orthodox and the secular, it is by becoming apathetic and disconnected from Israel.

Both responses trouble Mr. Beinart, who believes strongly in the centrality of Israel to “global Jewish peoplehood,” which is more than a shared religion.

And last week, he brought his arguments for the need for a different approach to Israel to the Vineyard. Mr. Beinart, associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and senior political writer for The Daily Beast, was on-Island visiting family. And while here he addressed the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center.

What he told them was, it is time for American Jews to take off the blinders.

“I told them,” he later said to the Gazette, “that confronting some of the ugly realities of what’s happening in Israel is not only morally necessary, but is also the best way of making a younger generation of American Jews feel connected to Israel.

“The strategy of avoiding the dark side of what is happening has been a failure in terms of producing Zionists.

“Ironically I think we have a better chance of bringing young American Jews to a feeling of connection to Israel by discussing more openly the nasty things that are happening there, by becoming part of the struggle for Israeli democracy, rather than pretending there is no struggle,” he said.

It’s a big task, though. Not least because, as he acknowledges, the forces of history and demography are working against change, particularly in Israel itself, but also in America.

The problem in Israel is that, notions of “global Jewish peoplehood” notwithstanding, an increasing share of the population of the country come from very different cultural and political backgrounds from those who founded the country.

Immigration patterns into Israel over time have resulted in some 40 per cent of the population being of Middle Eastern descent, he said. “The country also has had this huge immigration from Russia since the early 1990s, and that too has changed the character of Israeli society, in ways that there are no analogues for in the United States.

“On the other hand . . . the intellectuals who created [Israel] were children of the enlightenment. Israel’s declaration on independence talks in very specific terms about equal rights for all citizens, the right of free speech, freedom of religion and expression.

“And still in Haaretz, Israel’s most important newspaper, you see a biting level of criticism that in some ways supersedes anything you find in the American press. There is a very vibrant culture of self-criticism in Israel

“So Israel is involved in a struggle between those enlightenment currents and more authoritarian, illiberal currents.”

But the numbers, and with them the electoral weight, were shifting toward the illiberal. There was a growing tendency for the government to “demonize and clamp down on domestic critics, and also less popular tolerance for criticism.”

In America, too, Mr. Beinart sees growing division. First a denominational divide, in which reform, conservative and Reconstructionist Jews tend to be more open to criticism of Israel, while Orthodox Jews lean heavily to the political right. And, the Othodox are a growing proportion of the American population.

Second, there is a sharp generational divide. On the one side are older people whose views of Israel were formed when a weak state was struggling to emerge in the wake of the holocaust and who saw in the 1967 war the prospect that it could “be wiped out by the Arabs.”

On the other side are younger people who “came of age since the Lebanon war in the early 80s or the second intifada in 1988,” who saw the occupation of Palestinian lands, saw the rise of the settler movement and orthodox and ultra-Orthodox political right.

“Among younger American Jews,” he said “it is harder to ignore these phenomena. I have been struck by the generational divide. I found very, very, very few younger, non-Orthodox American Jews who are inclined to give Israel a pass.”

Third, and perhaps most crucially, from the perspective of American politics, there is the divide between the organized Jewish political lobby and the politics of ordinary American Jews.

“We’ve got this situation where the American Jewish organizations — by which I mean AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], the Conference of Presidents, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee — lean significantly to the right of where American Jews are as a whole,” he said.

This was evident in the run-up to the last Presidential election, where those groups expressed considerable anxiety about Barack Obama.

“Yet Obama won 78 per cent of the Jewish vote,” Mr. Beinart noted.

“Now his popularity is down in general, including with Jews. But anyone who would think the Republicans would have a prayer of winning a majority of the Jewish vote in 2012, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. And this is a group whose economic interests would seem to naturally align with the Republican party.

“If Obama was to run against Mitt Romney tomorrow, my guess is he would still win 70 per cent of the vote,.” he said. But he said Israel was not the major concern of most Jewish voters.

“There was a poll done, I think in 2000, which showed that only 10 per cent of Jews said Israel was their number one issue. Abortion is a bigger driver of the Jewish vote than Israel.”

But votes are not the same as political influence, which is bought by lobbying and donations. How do those donations break down?

Mr. Beinart could not be too specific.

“People are very loath to investigate what percentage of donors to the Democratic party are Jewish because it plays into certain anti-Semitic tropes,” he said. “But there’s no question for decades Jews have played a vastly disproportionate role in funding the Democratic party, and even the Republican party.”

But he did concede: “In that discrete segment of the Jewish community which is very, very focused on Israel, and also tends to have views towards the right, there was a lot of suspicion, which now has turned into anger at Obama. And such people have institutions that allow them to vent their anger, particularly in a mid-term election year when the Congressional Democrats are fund-raising, and particularly at a time when Obama has alienated Wall Street.

“He’s already created a problem with one major donor source. There’s probably some overlap.”

No wonder then, that President Obama had recently softened in his dealings with Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — about whose intentions Mr. Beinart is skeptical.

He would like to see Obama take a stronger stand — giving support for example to a unity government between Fatah and Hamas — but given the array of other problems facing the President, Mr. Beinart said he could see why “people in the administration would rather avoid another substantial political fight.”

So, then, one important priority is finding a way to match that right-wing money and influence. Hence the importance of the J Street project, the advocacy group set up to try to encourage a more balanced U.S. approach to the Middle East.

“J Street’s whole theory is you could replace that [right-wing] money with money from more liberal Jews. But J Street is a more fledgling organization.”

Still, he sees signs of progress. In the past couple of years, he believed, the American Jewish community was becoming more willing to criticize Israel.

And that is what he wants to encourage, for the sake of Israel, for the sake of America and Zionism in America, which is losing young Jews to apathy and alienation.

“What I said in my speech is that we should not present a Disneyfied Israel in which every government respects human rights and liberal democracy, and ask them to simply applaud and defend it against all criticism, with the implication that all criticism is anti-Semitic.

“Instead, convey the reality, which is of a society that’s involved in a very profound struggle between liberal and illiberal tendencies. Invite them to be a part of that struggle, with the self-confidence of people who for our own historical reasons have created a very vibrant culture of tolerance, non-racism and human rights,” he said.

Mr. Beinart drew an analogy with the freedom riders — many of them Jewish — who went South in the 1960s to support human rights for black Americans.

“They then went back to their campuses and were able to really engage a whole generation around the idea of a struggle for American democracy. What I would like to see is more of the people engaged in the struggle in Israel brought out to America’s campuses to spread the word,” he said.

His book is due out in the fall.