Books: Being Jewish after Gaza: Peter Beinart's 'reckoning' is a bid to rehabilitate Zionism

In the summer of 2010, the prominent Jewish American writer Peter Beinart dropped a bombshell on America's liberal elite.

He observed, as Israel continued to build illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and completed the first round of what it called "mowing the lawn" - the name given to the periodic bombing of Gaza - that attitudes towards Israel were dramatically shifting among young American Jews.

The winds were changing, Beinart noted in the New York Review of Books.

"Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral," he wrote.

He cautioned that the American Jewish establishment's refusal to change track on Israel's brutal occupation of the occupied territories would alienate young Jewish Americans from the Israeli state.

Read more: Being Jewish after Gaza: Peter Beinart's 'reckoning' is a bid to rehabilitate Zionism