Realization Is Growing That American Jews and
Israel No Longer Share a Moral and Ethical
Worldview
Allan C. Brownfeld
Issues
Spring - Summer 2017
American Jewish opinion concerning Israel is increasingly one of sharp
division. In his book Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict
over Israel, Prof. Dov Waxman of Northeastern University declares that, “A
historic change has been taking place in the American Jewish relationship
with Israel. The age of unquestioning and unstinting support for Israel is
over. The pro-Israel consensus that once united American Jews is eroding,
and Israel is fast becoming a source of division rather than unity … A new
era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of
solidarity. In short, Israel used to bring American Jews together. Now it is
driving them apart.”
The feeling is growing, particularly among young people, that Israel’s 50-
year occupation, which is one of the longest military occupations of one
people by another in modern history, its denial of basic political and human
rights to Palestinians in the occupied territories, and its retreat from
democracy within Israel itself, indicates that the moral and ethical values
to which most American Jews are committed are not shared by those currently
in power in Israel.
Israel has, for example, declared war on the nonviolent movement calling for
boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) as a means to end Israel’s
occupation. In the process, it is alienating more and more American Jews who
are sympathetic to the BDS movement, as well as others who see Israel’s move
away from shared democratic values. In March, 2017 the Knesset passed
legislation that prohibits the entry into Israel of anyone supporting and
belonging to the BDS movement. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Yonah Jeremy
Bob asks: “Does this include a left-wing Jewish college student who calls
for a boycott of Israel on his Facebook page? Does it include an individual
who made a small, one-time contribution to a BDS organization? Are
foreigners who wish to boycott only the settlements but not the rest of
Israel included?
Banned from Israel
Peter Beinart, a contributing editor of The Forward, wrote a column (March
17, 2017) headlined, “I support boycotting settlements — Should I be banned
from Israel?” He notes that, “I’m one of those people at whom Israel’s new
law is aimed because in 2012 I wrote s book that urged American Jews to buy
products from ‘democratic Israel,’ the territory inside Israel’s original
boundaries, in which Jews and Palestinians live under the same law, but not
‘nondemocratic Israel,’ the West Bank, where Jews enjoy citizenship and
Palestinians live under colonial rule. So while I oppose boycotting Israel
as a whole, I support boycotting Israeli settlements, which I believe
threaten Israel’s moral character and its long-term survival.”
Rachel Stryer, a senior and co-chair of J Street U at Stanford University,
wrote an article in The Forward asking, “Will Birthright Kowtow to Israel’s
Right-Wing Government?” Discussing the Birthright Israel program, which
sends Jewish students on free trips to Israel, she writes: “This summer I
planned to travel to Israel through Birthright … I had long been looking
forward to the voyage. Now, I don’t know whether I’ll be allowed on the trip
… I am a strong supporter of the two-state solution as the only way to
secure Israel’s future … and guarantee the rights of the Palestinian people.
I see the occupation and the entrenchment and expansion of the settlement
movement as a threat to these principles. Because of this, I make the
personal choice not to buy products manufactured in Israeli settlements in
the West Bank.”
Because of the new law, Stryer notes, “Many pro-Israel American Jews are
worried that, thanks to our political beliefs, we may no longer be welcome
in Israel … There are many Jewish young people like me at Stanford and
across the country who are excited about exploring Israel, but who also find
ourselves in opposition to the country’s settlement policy and deeply
concerned about the ongoing occupation … More than just my summer plans are
on the line here. Israel’s future — and the future of the American Jewish
relationship with Israel — hang in the balance.”
Diversity and Social Justice
In the view of Ian Lustick, a professor of political science at the
University of Pennsylvania, the Israeli law banning entry to supporters of
BDS criminalizes thought, “since it would imply that anyone who helped
organize a public discussion of whether to boycott the State of Israel would
also be bannable from the country. In other words, it would be an attempt to
stop people from thinking.”
A Turning Point
Writing in The Nation, Mairev Zonszein described the new law as marking a
turning point in Israel’s relationship with American Jews. Israel, she
argues, no longer cares what American Jews think: “Israel is sending the
message. That it does not want or need American Jewish involvement if that
involvement takes the form of pitched criticism or dissent and that the
cultural or historic is just not that important to them.”
Open Hillel has called on Hillel International to condemn Israel’s
“dissenter ban,” which it says “will impact the thousands of Jewish students
who travel to Israel to tour, study, research, intern or work.”
In the opinion of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, “A law that
stifles dissidents, that bars lovers of Israel from Israel itself, is not
only repugnant on the face of it, but also additional evidence that
occupation of the West Bank is corroding Israeli democracy. Israel may win
the West Bank and lose its soul.”
The legislation regarding banning BDS supporters from Israel is only one
example of what many see as a movement away from democratic values. Today,
there are 750,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem. There is now a growing movement in Israel to annex the occupied
territories completely. Israel passed a law in February called the
Regularization Law. It retroactively legalized at least a dozen settlement
outposts built on privately-owned Palestinian land and laid the framework
for easily legalizing other outposts in the future.
Settlement Outposts
Settlement outposts are Israeli communities in the occupied West Bank built
without authorization from the Israeli government’s planning and zoning
departments, many of which are located near larger settlements recognized by
Israel. In many cases, settlement outposts are retroactively declared
neighborhoods of already existing settlements, but in the past, before the
Regularization Law, legalizing such outposts on private Palestinian land was
more difficult, as Palestinians had the right to fight the existence of the
outposts on their land in court.
One of the main features of the Regularization Law is a legal mechanism that
allows outposts built on private Palestinian land to be legalized under
Israeli law, as long as the settlers living in the community can prove the
outpost was created “in good faith,” or without knowledge that the land
belonged to Palestinians. Both Israeli settlements and outposts are
considered illegal under international law. International law is clear that
an occupying power can take land only for military needs. It is widely
believed that Israel committed a war crime in transferring more than 700,000
Jewish civilians into the occupied territories. Dozens of settlement
outposts were built across the West Bank, often on private Palestinian land.
Despite the fact that they violated Israeli law, the outposts immediately
received state services, from electricity to water to buses and schools.
Many in Israel recognize that this behavior is in violation of international
law. Dan Meridor, a former government minister from Prime Minister
Netanyahu’s Likud Party, called the new Regularization Law “evil and
dangerous.” Israel, he pointed out, can have jurisdiction over private
Palestinian land only if Palestinians are able to vote for Israel’s
parliament. What is taking place at the present time, he declares, is
annexation by other means. This, in effect, “shuts the door on any kind of
Palestinian state.” Opposition leader Isaac Herzog says that, “The train
departing from here has only one stop — at The Hague.” This is a reference
to the home of the International Criminal Court.
Human Rights Organizations
Another bill introduced in the Knesset in May would bar non-government human
rights organizations from petitioning the High Court of Justice on behalf of
Palestinians. It was proposed, reports Haaretz, “following the wave of court
petitions filed seeking the evacuation of settlements built on privately
owned Palestinian land … The bill would bar Knesset members from petitioning
the court to challenge cabinet decisions and laws passed by the Knesset and
would provide that no individual, organization or public agency could
petition the court to challenge a government action unless that action
directly and personally harmed either the individual petitioner, members of
the petitioning organization or an interest that a public agency is
entrusted to upholding.” The bill’s sponsors include members of almost all
the parties in the government coalition. It is aimed primarily at human-
rights organizations such as Yesh Din, Peace Now and the Association for
Civil Rights in Israel, which routinely petition the court on behalf of
Palestinians. It was prompted partly by the fact that such petitions have
repeatedly led to the evacuation of neighborhoods of West Bank settlements
and illegal outposts that were built on privately owned Palestinian land.
The Netanyahu government now wants to downgrade the status of Arabic. A
proposed law would strip Arabic of official language status and define
Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people,” although more than 20%
of its population is not Jewish, most of whom are native Arabic speakers.
Only Hebrew is defined as “the national language” in this so-called
“Nationality Bill,” which declares that “the right to self-determination” in
Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” Ayman Odeh, a Knesset member who
heads the mainly Arab Joint List alliance, said that this bill would mean
trampling on minority rights and would “legally transform us into second
class citizens.”
Passed in the Knesset in a preliminary vote early in May, the “Nationality
Bill” refers to Israel as the “nation state of the Jewish people.” Its chief
sponsor, Likud Knesset member Avi Dichter said that, “Israel is the state of
all its individual citizens.” This, however, is not the case. Israel has
citizens, but it has no “Israeli nationals”. Israel does not recognize such
a category as Israeli nationality. The recent U.N. Report on Israel, which
was shelved because of pressure from Israel and the U.S., makes this clear:
“Palestinian political parties can campaign for minor reforms and better
budgets, but are legally prohibited by the Basic Law from challenging
legislation maintaining the racial regime. The policy is reinforced by the
implications of the distinction made in Israel between citizenship (ezrahut)
and nationality (le’um): all Israeli citizens enjoy the former, but only
Jews the latter. ‘National’ rights in Israeli law signify Jewish national
rights.”
The sponsor of the Nationality Bill, Avi Dichter, agrees with this
assessment: “It isn’t and won’t be the nation-state of any minority living
in it. That is a right this bill gives to the Jewish people alone.”
A Theocracy with an Established Religion
But if Israel calls itself a “Jewish” state, it does not provide equal
rights to non-Orthodox Jews any more than it does to Palestinians. More and
more American Jews are coming to understand that Israel is a theocracy, with
an established religion, Orthodox Judaism. In many respects its view of the
relationship between church and state is far closer to that of its Arab
neighbors than to Western democracies. In Israel, Reform, Conservative and
Reconstructionist rabbis have no right to perform weddings, preside at
funerals, or have their conversions recognized. In Israel, there is no such
thing as civil marriage. Jews and non-Jews who wish to marry must leave
Israel to do so.
At the Kotel, or Western Wall, men and women are not permitted to pray
together, despite the fact that the Israeli government has promised to
provide for egalitarian prayer at this site. Jane Eisner, editor of The
Forward, wrote of a recent visit to Jerusalem: “I was in Jerusalem for a
week … and I never once went to the Kotel … Instead of being drawn to what
is considered the most sacred site in Judaism, I felt repelled. The
unwillingness of the Israeli government to follow through on its promise to
expand the Kotel plaza to include a proper egalitarian prayer space left me
resentful and alienated. If the Kotel didn’t want to welcome Jews like me
well, then, I had better uses of my time in Jerusalem … Many men and women —
including the vast majority of American Jews — wish to pray together in a
space not dominated by an increasingly strict and unreasonable rabbinical
authority.”
The Netanyahu government introduced legislation in May that would reject all
conversions performed in Israel outside the Orthodox-sanctioned state
system. If passed into law, this bill would deny citizenship under the Law
of Return to Jews converted in Israel by Conservative, Reform or privately
run Orthodox rabbinical courts.
Western Concepts of Religious Freedom
An examination of this question reveals how far removed Israel is from
Western concepts of religious freedom. Currently, Reform and Conservative
conversions conducted in Israel are recognized only for the purpose of
registration in the population registry. Unlike Jews who have undergone
Reform and Conservative conversions in other countries, Jews who have
undergone such conversions in Israel are not eligible for citizenship under
the Law of Return or any of the financial benefits this law confers on
immigrants to the country.
The Reform and Conservative movements in Israel maintain that the draft bill
is unconstitutional since the Law of Return applies to all individuals who
have converted in recognized Jewish communities and does not distinguish
between conversions performed in Israel of those performed elsewhere or
between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform conversions. Rabbi Gilad Kari ,
executive director of the Reform movement in Israel, warned that the draft
bill would aggravate already tense relations between the government and non-
Orthodox groups. “This is a bill,” he declared, “that undermines the mission
of the State of Israel to serve as a home of the Jewish people.” Yitzhak
Hess, executive director of the Conservative movement, declared that, “Even
the cruelest monopolies become pathetic the moment before they collapse.”
The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War, and the 50-
year occupation which has followed, has focused much attention upon the
contradiction between Israel’s reality and its claim to be a Western-style
democracy. In a cover article, “Why Israel Needs a Palestinian State,” The
Economist (May 20-25, 2017) provides this assessment: “… the never-ending
subjugation of the Palestinians will erode Israel’s standing abroad and
damage its democracy at home. Its politics are turning towards ethnic-
religious chauvinism, seeking to marginalize Arabs and Jewish leftists,
including human rights groups. The government objected even to a novel about
a Jewish-Arab love affair. As Israel grows wealthier, the immiseration of
Palestinians becomes more disturbing. Its predicament grows more acute as
the number of Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean
catches up with that of Jews. Israel cannot hold on to all of the ‘Land of
Israel,’ keep its predominantly Jewish identity and remain a proper
democracy. To save democracy, and prevent a slide to racism or even
apartheid, it has to give up the occupied lands.”
“Budding Fascism”
In Israel itself, many voices have been raised to warn about the danger of
current trends. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak talks of “budding fascism.”
Moshe Arens, a former defense minister, and President Reuven Rivlin have
expressed concern over the crass racism which is, more and more, in
evidence. Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew
University, notes that, “Likud was hawkish, but was liberal and democratic.
It has been transformed. For ultra nationalists, the enemy is within — NGOs,
the minorities, the courts.”
The realization that more and more American Jews are becoming alienated from
Israel, a society which repeatedly proclaims itself “Jewish” but seems to be
moving away from the Jewish moral and ethical tradition, is being
increasingly discussed by those in the Jewish establishment who have sought
to defend Israeli actions in the name of a “solidarity,” not shared by those
in whose name they try to speak.
An article, “Why Many American Jews Are Becoming Indifferent or Even Hostile
to Israel” appeared in the publication Mosaic (May 8, 2017). Its author
Daniel Gordis is Koret Distinguished Fellow and Chair of the core curriculum
at Shalem College in Jerusalem. He writes: “The waning of attachment to
Israel among American Jews, especially but not exclusively younger American
Jews, has rightly become a central focus of concern for religious and
communal leaders … American Jewish disaffection from Israel … were
underscored during the waning days of the Obama administration, when by far
the greater portion of American Jews stayed faithful to the president and
his party even after his decision to allow passage of an undeniably anti-
Israel resolution at the U.N.”
The reasons for this disaffection have been widely examined. In “The Star
and Stripes,” Michael Barnett notes that while most American Jews embrace “a
political theology of prophetic Judaism” and exhibit “cosmopolitan
longings,” Israel is “increasingly acting like an ethnonational state.” To
Dov Waxman in “Trouble in the Tribe,” the movement of Israel in an
“increasingly illiberal” direction has forced young American Jews to “turn
away in despair, or even disgust.” Making a similar point was a column by
the veteran Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas titled, “Sorry Israel, U.S. Jewry
Just Isn’t That into You.” The reason, wrote Pinkas, was “the reality of
decades of Israeli occupation” of Palestinians, compounded by “the
dismissal, inconsiderate and at times arrogant Israeli attitude toward
(American) Reform and Conservative Jews.”
Fundamentally Different If Not Antithetical
Beyond this, argues Gordis, “… the emerging impression among significant
numbers of American Jews is that Israel and modern day progressive America
are two fundamentally different if not antithetical political projects … In
contrast to the U.S., whose neutrality in matters of religion, afforded Jews
an opportunity for flourishing … a ‘Jewish and Zionist state’ could not, and
cannot, be religiously neutral … The purpose of the two countries do
diverge, and so do their visions of both democracy and the ideal society.
The most obvious difference between the American and Israeli project lies in
the ethnic particularism at the core of Israel’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 … American Jewish life and
Israeli life reflect the difference between voluntary and non-voluntary
communities … Add … the American idea of the primacy of the universal over
the particular and the ideological insistence that religion is a strictly
private matter, the more American Jews think of Judaism 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?”
American Jewish ambivalence about Israel is nothing new. The historian
Jerold Auerbach has observed: “Even the idea of a Jewish state, to say
nothing of the reality of Israel, seldom inspired feelings of passionate
attachment in the majority of American Jews.” In 1950, Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion’s assertion that Israel was now the de facto center of the Jewish
world provoked an irate Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish
Committee, to respond that, “There can be no single spokesman for world
Jewry no matter who that spokesman might try to be.” At that time, David
Ben-Gurion signed an agreement which stipulated, among other things, that,
“Jews of the United States, as a community, and as individuals, have only
one political attachment, namely to the United States of America.” Yet,
today Israel claims to be the “homeland” of all Jews, and proclaims that
those living elsewhere are in “exile.” No other country in the world claims
to represent men and women who are citizens of other countries.
Detachment Will Spread and Deepen
Unless something changes dramatically, either in Israel or in the U.S.,
concludes Gordis, “Sizable proportions of American Jews will continue to
bristle not only at what Israel does but at what, to their minds, Israel
represents and is. For at least as far as the eye can see, this self-
administered detachment … with all its larger implications for Jewish
cohesion as well as for American foreign policy in the Middle East, is
likely to spread and deepen.”
Clearly, Israel and American Jews are moving in quite different directions.
Their worldviews are very much at odds and their concept of religious
freedom, separation of church and state and living in multi-racial and
multi-ethnic societies differ dramatically. Zionism and its notion of Jewish
ethnicity, rather than the larger vision of Judaism being a universal,
prophetic religion, is in retreat. If American Jewish organizations persist
in making Israel “central” to their idea of Jewish identity, their future
seems uncertain at best. A new dawn, which seems far more hopeful, is
rising. •
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