Keen On

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can still talk about Israel, but whether we can afford not to. Silence, Daniel Sokatch warns, is complicity — and in both America and Israel, there’s already too much of it.Four years ago, Daniel Sokatch came on the show to discuss Can We Talk About Israel?, a guide for what he called “the curious, the confused, and the conflicted.” Now Sokatch is back with a new edition of his book. As head of the New Israel Fund, the liberal Zionist has spent his career defending the controversial idea that Israel can be both a Jewish and democratic state. Today, even as the Zionist dream continues to unravel, Sokatch insists that we need to continue talking about Israel. Without talk, Daniel Sokatch warns, there’s silence - and that silence might guarantee the end of the dream of both a Jewish and democratic state between what he calls “the river and the sea.”* Israel’s crisis is moral, not just political.For Sokatch, the war in Gaza has exposed the collapse of Israel’s founding p