the times they are a-changin’

[spelling fixed]

The Overton Window is a theory that describes a range of acceptable ideas in political discourse and a (theoretical) way to make formerly unacceptable ideas gradually more acceptable . It’s a game of “Compared to What?” The idea is that by introducing ever more extreme ideas into the discourse, you reduce the feeling of menace from formerly threatening ideas. So: gradually, what was once totally unacceptable—say, openly gay couples living together in straight society—becomes utterly ordinary and unremarkable.

Jeffrey Goldberg, in today’s New York Times, opens up the Overton Window of American discourse about Israel with tough talk for the creaky, knee-jerking pro-Israel lobby groups.

The people of Aipac and the Conference of Presidents are well meaning, and their work in strengthening the overall relationship between America and Israel has ensured them a place in the world to come. But what’s needed now is a radical rethinking of what it means to be pro-Israel.

…

I am not wishing that the next president be hostile to Israel, God forbid. But what Israel needs is an American president who not only helps defend it against the existential threat posed by Iran and Islamic fundamentalism, but helps it to come to grips with the existential threat from within. A pro-Israel president today would be one who prods the Jewish state — publicly, continuously and vociferously — to create conditions on the West Bank that would allow for the birth of a moderate Palestinian state.

In crisis there is always opportunity. There’s no doubt that Israel is in crisis [e.a.]:

[Olmert] was expansive, and persuasive, on the Zionist need for a Palestinian state. Without a Palestine — a viable, territorially contiguous Palestine — Arabs under Israeli control will, in the not-distant future, outnumber the country’s Jews.

“We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us,” he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, “the state of Israel is finished,” Mr. Olmert said in an earlier interview. This is why he, and his mentor, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Mr. Sharon and Mr. Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state. In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.

Will those in crisis seize it as an opportunity? It means investing—money, time, effort, PR—in the West Bank, turning it into a local success story, and the faster the better.

Will anyone have the imagination to turn things around in this way?

At least Goldberg took an important first step, by making it okay to talk about it in polite society.

Or perhaps it isn’t okay to talk about this in public. Indeed, perhaps it’s “jewidice”  “jewicide”   [emphasis in original]:

Read that again. Prods (as in pressures) Israel to surrender Jewish land to Islamic jihad. That’s what this kapo is saying.

Sheesh.