In his book We Stand Divided: The Rift between American Jews and Israel—published today—Daniel Gordis roundly rejects the oft-heard assertion that the rift of the subtitle is the result of the “occupation,” or the supposed rightward drift of Israeli politics, or anything having to do with the government’s policies at all. Instead, Gordis suggests that the divide stems not from what Israel does, but from what Israel is. He first made this case in a 2017 essay in Mosaic, out of which the book grew:

The most obvious difference between the American and Israeli projects lies in the ethnic particularism at the core of the latter’s very reason for being. American universalism hardly denies the multiplicity of ethnicities that make up the American people; what it does deny is the notion that any of them should be politically central or defining.

Why the resulting chasm should have opened so wide in recent years is not entirely obvious. But one can list a few contributing factors. They include the abovementioned erosion of Holocaust memory, the stubborn perdurance of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, and younger American Jews’ utter ignorance of when and how “the occupation” began. Add to these the skyrocketing rate of intermarriage in America, which in turn renders increasingly vexed any notion of Judaism as the faith of a single and singular people.

Add, as well, the American idea of the primacy of the universal over the particular and the ideological insistence on religion as strictly a private matter. The more American Jews think of Judaism only in religious terms, without the component of peoplehood, the less necessary and less justified Israel becomes, the more anomalous and abnormal. Religions, after all, do not typically have countries. Is there a Methodist country? A Baha’i state?

And then of course, making matters much worse, there are the current trends on American campuses. The pervasive anti-Zionism at many American universities, often a thin mask for anti-Semitism, triggers in many a young Jew an understandable impulse to lie low or to signal one’s dissociation from Israel lest one become tarred with the brush of ignominy. Nor, in a climate in which campus administrators exempt rabid anti-Israel speakers and demonstrators from the general ban on all sorts of lesser aggressions, is attachment to Israel likely to appeal to any but the hardiest souls.

When the Arab Spring came to Syria in 2011, the Druze for the most part remained loyal to the regime—which has generally depended on the support of religious minorities such as the Druze and thus afforded them a modicum of protection. But in the past several weeks that has changed, with sustained anti-government protests in the Druze-dominated southwestern province of Suwayda. Ehud Yaari evaluates the implications of this shift:

The disillusionment of the Druze with Bashar al-Assad, their suspicion of militias backed by Iran and Hizballah on the outskirts of their region, and growing economic hardships are fanning the flames of revolt. In Syrian Druze circles, there is now open discussion of “self-rule,” for example replacing government offices and services with local Druze alternative bodies.

Is there a politically acceptable way to assist the Druze and prevent the regime from the violent reoccupation of Jebel al-Druze, [as they call the area in which they live]? The answer is yes. It would require Jordan to open a short humanitarian corridor through the village of al-Anat, the southernmost point of the Druze community, less than three kilometers from the Syrian-Jordanian border.

Setting up a corridor to the Druze would require a broad consensus among Western and Gulf Arab states, which have currently suspended the process of normalization with Assad. . . . The cost of such an operation would not be high compared to the humanitarian corridors currently operating in northern Syria. It could be developed in stages, and perhaps ultimately include, if necessary, providing the Druze with weapons to defend their territory. A quick reminder: during the Islamic State attack on Suwayda province in 2018, the Druze demonstrated an ability to assemble close to 50,000 militia men almost overnight.