In a provocative new book published this week, “The Crisis of Zionism,” Peter Beinart bemoans the trajectory of the State of Israel and of American Jews. His suggestions for saving both include a boycott of products from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a plan that has aroused a torrent of criticism. In an interview March 28 with Al-Monitor Washington correspondent Barbara Slavin, Beinart argues that Israel is “sleepwalking to a one-state solution” and that other efforts to slow or stop settlement expansion are “miserably failing.” Beinart also argues for financial support by the US government for Jewish education in the US, and looks for progressive change among Orthodox Jews, particularly women demanding more equal rights. Beinart is also editor in chief of the new blog Open Zion on The Daily Beast. Excerpts from the conversation follow:

Al-Monitor:  The reaction to your book has been fascinating. Haaretz called you "the Jewish establishment’s enfant terrible." Bret Stephens was a little nastier. If neoconservatives are liberals mugged by reality, are you a former neocon mugged by the current reality of Israel?

Beinart:  I was very influenced by Bosnia and the Gulf War when I was in college and in my 20s. That led me, unfortunately, to be sympathetic to the Iraq war early on ... I was never a neoconservative because I never shared the neoconservative hostility to international institutions. I was a liberal hawk who was marrying American power and international legitimacy ...

I do think my writing on Israel is a product of grappling in the last couple of years with some of the realities in Israel that are now harder to ignore particularly with the rise of this Israeli government, the rise of Avigdor Lieberman [foreign minister and head of the Yisrael Beitenu party that has advocated expelling some Israeli Arabs to maintain Israel’s Jewish majority] and the increase in the settlement population and the increasingly anti-democratic turn that you see in Israeli politics … The question was whether I was going to avoid writing about this subject and cut myself off from something that was perhaps the subject that was closest to my heart, or write about it even recognizing that it would be controversial.