Progressive American Jews who claim to be pro-Zionist and pro-Israel yet concentrate their writing and public activities on condemning Israel are spreading an idea which is gaining legitimacy and picking up steam.

Over the weekend, an example of this trend appeared in an op-ed featured in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post. It was written by two academics from elite institutions: Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, and Glen Weyl, an assistant professor of law and economics at the University of Chicago.

The title of their op-ed says it all:

We Are Lifelong Zionists. Here’s Why We’ve Chosen to Boycott Israel.

They follow a usual trope. The Jewish writer first proclaims that he has always supported Israel and has the best interests of Israel at heart. Yet the professors’ prescription is a complete boycott of Israel — including all of its products and the withdrawal of all U.S. aid and diplomatic support — and support of boycotts and divestitures from the Israeli economy.

Their motivation, they tell us,  is their “love for Israel and a desire to save it”:

Like other progressive Jews, our support for Israel has been founded on two convictions: first, that a state was necessary to protect our people from future disaster; and second, that any Jewish state would be democratic, embracing the values of universal human rights that many took as a lesson of the Holocaust.

They are disappointed. One problem is that they don’t love Israel as it exists today; they love the socialist Israel of yesteryear when Histadrut ran the economy, the Kibbutz was flourishing, and the Labor Party ran the country. But now Israel has betrayed them by moving to privatization and away from collectivism — and by becoming remarkably prosperous.

But Israel’s really egregious crime is that it has allowed itself to exist by taking “undemocratic” measures —  i.e., occupying the West Bank and Gaza and denying “basic rights” to all the Palestinian people.

Their conclusion: American “progressive” Jews — their own definition of the only moral and decent American Jews — can no longer support a state that denies a people their legitimate rights. This follows with their comparison of Israel with apartheid-era South Africa, which in turn has made Israel into a pariah state.

That is why, they believe, “violence like the recent wave of attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank” takes place and has become normal.

Their effort to save Israel from itself might lead them down the path taken by the footsteps of the late historian Tony Judt, who wrote columns in The London Review of Books about his disenchantment with Israel, and who advocated a bi-national state instead of a two-state solution — a “solution” that would do away with the Jewish state altogether.