TURMOIL GROWS IN THE JEWISH COMMUNITY AS ZIONISM
INCREASINGLY SEEMS TO BE A MISTAKEN PATH
Allan C. Brownfeld
Issues
Spring - Summer 2023
As Israel’s far-right regime advances its agenda, the American Jewish community
is in growing turmoil as more and more Jewish voices are being heard expressing
concern that having embraced Zionism was a mistaken path—-one which completely
ignored Jewish moral and ethical values and failed to apply such values to the
indigenous Palestinian residents of what became Israel.
When Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich visited Washington in March to
address an Israel Bonds meeting, no U.S. Government official would meet with him.
Neither would the representatives of leading American Jewish organizations.
Smotrich, a leader of the Religious Zionism party, was criticized, in particular,
for calling for the Palestinian village of Huwara in the West Bank to be “wiped
out.” Speaking in Paris on March 19, Smotrich said, “There’s no such thing as
Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.”
Washington Jewish Week (March 16, 2023) reported that, “Outside the hotel…a
multitude of people representing area synagogues and…organizations …chanted, sang
songs and listened to speakers who called Smotrich a homophobe, someone who
doesn’t consider Reform Jews Jewish, a supporter of segregated maternity wards
for Jews and non-Jews and a person who considers women subservient…Senior Rabbi
Jonathan Roos of Temple Sinai in Washington, D.C. was at the protests with…
congregants. ‘We are here to continue to stand against hate and for democracy.’
Rabbi Esther Lederman from the Union for Reform Judaism urged Jews to raise their
voices…She called Smotrich a ‘fascist homophobe.’”
“Hateful Views”
Only two Jewish organizations were willing to meet with Smotrich, the Orthodox
Union and the right-wing Zionist Organization of America. In a statement, the
Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington declared, “The hateful
views long expressed by Minister Smotrich are abhorrent …and run contrary to
Jewish values…No public servant should ever condone or incite hatred or hate-
motivated violence and when they do, they will be fiercely condemned by a wide
swath of American Jewry.” William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, called Smotrich’s statements
“disgusting.” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 3, 2023)
In a sermon entitled “This Passover Must Include Palestinians,” Brant Rosen,
rabbi and co-founder of Congregation Tzedek of Chicago and founder of the Jewish
Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council, declared that, “The anti-government protests
within Israel embody liberal Zionism, rather than liberation for all. Let’s
dream bigger.”
Rabbi Rosen makes the case that, “In Israel…the struggle for democracy is far
more complicated. As a Jewish state, Israeli democracy can only truly extend to
Jewish citizens. Unlike the United States, where those who advocate equal rights
for all can still be described as ‘believing fervently in the American creed,’
those who call for one state with equal citizenship for all are routinely accused
of anti-Semitism, seeking nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state.”
Israel Has No Constitution
Another important difference, Rabbi Rosen points out, is that, “…unlike the U.S.,
Israel does not have a constitution. That, theoretically at least, ensures equal
rights for all citizens.” He cites journalist Joshua Leifer on Israel’s aborted
attempts at creating a constitution: “America’s Constitution begins ‘We the
people.’ One of the things that is very striking when you read the drafts of the
Israeli constitution that was written in 1950 is that the proposed version…began
with ‘The Jewish people’. The ethnocracy was imagined as the demos from the
beginning.”
Rabbi Rosen concludes: “Like many Americans, I believe it is my responsibility to
challenge my country to, as Martin Luther King put it, ‘live out the true meaning
of its creed.’ Among other things, this means actively supporting anti-racist
struggles in the U.S. that demand full and equal rights for all its citizens. As
an American Jew living in the age of Zionism, I can demand nothing less for all
who live between the river and the sea.”
After World War II, as established American Jewish organizations, with a few
honorable exceptions, embraced the Zionist cause, they tended to overlook the
fact that Palestine was already populated and that the goal of the Zionist
leadership was to eliminate as many of the indigenous residents as it could.
Even with the emergence of Israel’s “New Historians,” who told the world about
the ethnic cleansing embarked upon by the Israeli government, leading American
Jewish organizations ignored the growing body of evidence.
Myths About Israel
In his important book “Ten Myths About Israel,” expatriate Israeli historian Ilan
Pappe, now a professor at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom,
examines the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the
early 1980s. He offers a view of Israel’s creation in 1948 which includes the
corresponding expulsion or flight of more than 700,000 Palestinians. Pappe shows
that the expulsions were not decided on an ad hoc basis but constituted the
ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in accordance with Plan Dalet, drawn up in
1947 by Israel’s future leaders. In a 2004 interview, Pappe said: “The aim has
always been , and it still remains, to have as much of Palestine as possible with
as few Palestinians.”
In 1937, David Ben-Gurion declared, “With compulsory transfer we would have a
vast area for settlement. I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything
immoral in it.”
Plan Dalet, Pappe and the other Israeli historians show us, included the
following clear reference to the methods to be employed in the process of
cleansing the population: “Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up,
and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are
difficult to control continuously…Mounting search and control operations
according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and
conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must
be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the
state.”
Israeli War Crime
In Pappe’s view, “From our present vantage point, there is no escape from
defining the Israeli actions in the Palestine countryside as a war crime.
Indeed, as a crime against humanity. If one ignores this hard fact, one will
never understand what lies beyond Israel’s attitude toward Palestine and
Palestinians as a political system and a society. The crime committed by the
leadership of the Zionist movement, which became the government of Israel, was
that of ethnic cleansing. This is not mere rhetoric but an indictment with far-
reaching political, legal and moral implications. The definition of the crime
was clarified in the aftermath of the 1990s civil war in the Balkans: ethnic
cleansing is any action by one ethnic group meant to drive out another ethnic
group with the purpose of transforming a mixed ethnic region into a pure one.”
In his book “What Is Modern Israel?,” Yakov Rabkin, Professor Emeritus of History
at the University of Montreal, points out that, “The official Zionist ideology
has made Israel a state without borders. In geographical terms, it can be
extended with military conquest or colonization. The Zionist movement and
successive Israeli governments have taken great pains never to define the borders
they envisage for their state. This borderless character is also embodied by
Israel’s claim that it belongs to the world’s Jews rather than to its citizens.
This leads to the increasingly overt transformation of Jewish organizations
around the world into Israeli vassals.”
Beyond this, notes Rabkin, “By emphasizing the primacy of an ethnically and
denominationally defined ‘Jewish nationality,’ the state of Israel turns its back
on the idea of an ‘Israeli nationality that would reflect the multicultural
society that has taken shape on this land…over the last century…According to the
Israeli philosopher Joseph Agassi, Israeli governments have behaved like
community functionaries still living in a ghetto, sweeping aside the interests of
Israel’s non-Jews and thus stoking the fires of perpetual war, for a ghetto
equipped with a powerful army is dangerous.”
Massacre At Dayr Yasin
In his book “The Hundred Years War on Palestine,” Columbia University Professor
Rashid Khalidi writes of the manner in which Palestinians were treated in
Israel’s early days: “Scenes of flight unfolded in smaller towns and villages in
many parts of the country. People fled as news spread of the massacres like that
on April 9, 1948 in the village of Dayr Yasin near Jerusalem, where 100
residents, 67 of them women, children and old people were slaughtered when the
village was stormed by Irgun and Haganah assailants.”
These events, collectively known as the Nakba, represented what Khalidi calls “a
watershed in the history of the Middle East. It transformed most of Palestine
from what it had been for well over a millennium—-a majority Arab country—-into a
new state that had a substantial Jewish majority. This transformation was the
result of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited
areas…and the theft of Palestinian land and property left behind by the refugees
as well as much of that owned by the Arabs who remained in Israel. There would
have been no other way to achieve a Jewish majority, the explicit aim of
political Zionism from its inception. Nor would it have been possible to
dominate the country without the seizure of land.”
Slowly, many Israelis came to understand what Zionism had done. Imagine scholars
looking back 100 years from now, historian Zeev Sternhell asked, “…when exactly
did the Israelis understand that their cruelty toward the non-Jews in their grip
in the occupied territories, their determination to break the Palestinians’ hope
for independence…began to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national
existence?”
Accepting Israel’s False Claim
In the years when Israel’s policy was under way, the American Jewish
establishment accepted almost without question Israel’s false claim that
neighboring Arab states had called upon Palestinians to abandon their homes and
flee from the country. Even later, when Israel’s New Historians were able to
document that this was simply Israeli propaganda and had never happened, leading
American Jewish groups persisted in advancing this false narrative. Now, the
reality of Israel’s treatment of Palestine’s indigenous population is becoming
widely understood. It is increasingly clear that Israel never was what the
American Jewish leadership said it was, advanced in its religious schools and
used as a basis for promoting massive U.S. financial aid. Now, finally, the
myths about Israel are in the process of fading away.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, long a strong supporter of Israel,
wrote a column in the Times (March 7, 2023) with the headline, “American Jews,
You Have to Choose Sides on Israel.” He writes: “Ever since Israel’s founding
in 1948, supporting the country’s security and its economic development and
cementing its diplomatic ties to the U.S. have been the ‘religion’ of many
nonobservant American Jews…Now, a lot of American Jews are going to need to find
a new focus for their passion…because if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
succeeds with his judicial putsch…the subject of Israel could fracture every
synagogue and Jewish communal organization in America.”
In Friedman’s view, “…the interests of American Jews and Israel have been
diverging for many years, but it’s been papered over…he (Netanyahu) is currently
leading his sixth government as prime minister…and has increasingly partnered
with more and more ultranationalist and ultra religious parties and has come to
embrace the Trumpist playbook…Under Netanyahu, Israeli governments sought every
way possible to avoid the peace process with the Palestinians and used every
opportunity possible to demonize Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, even though
Netanyahu knew that for years Abbas’s Palestinian Authority was providing
essential security cooperation with Israel in the West Bank.”
“A paradigm shift”
In what Friedman calls “a paradigm shift,” he cites Gidi Grinstein, the founder
of the Israeli think tank Reut, who published an essay in the Times of Israel
calling for American Jews to reimagine themselves as “a robust, resilient and
prosperous community” that invests in its own vitality and has institutions and
contributes to American society, no longer accepting the “domineering Zionist
discourse that holds American Jewry to be second-class Judaism.”
Sheldon Richman, Executive Editor of the Libertarian Institute and author of
“Coming To Palestine,” points out that, “An older generation of Americans,
including Jewish Americans, admire the colonists who resisted the British king
and parliament in the late 1700s. Jewish Americans go further and admire the
Judeans who revolted against the Greeks and Romans (twice) in antiquity. So
isn’t it peculiar that they do not applaud the similar Palestinian resistance to
Israel’s domination…The treatment of the Palestinians is either consistent with
what are called Jewish values or it is not. …If it is not, then why has it gone
on 56 years after the West Bank and Gaza and the Golan Heights were taken
militarily (to be annexed in law or in fact) and 75 years after a group of
Europeans declared the existence of Israel (no borders specified) and the
Palestinians who managed to stay in Israel, despite the catastrophe (Nakba) of
their brethren being driven from their homes, were made no better than second
class citizens (if that) subject to all sorts of government …mistreatment and
discrimination? So much for Israel’s Declaration of Independence.”
Richman, a former senior editor at the Cato Institute, notes that, “The former
head of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Goldmann wrote in his 1969
autobiography that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, told him that
if he were an Arab, he wouldn’t talk to Israel’s founders because they had taken
their country. And let’s remember how the Israelites came to possess all of
Canaan in the first place, according to the Book of Joshua in the Hebrew Bible…
But the remnant of anti-Zionist Jews (bless their hearts), such as the American
Council for Judaism, interpret unfaithfulness to include a failure to act justly.
And idolatry as the placement of the Jewish state above all else.”
A Democracy Only For Jews
In his book, “We Are Not One,” Eric Alterman, an award-winning journalist and a
CUNY Distinguished professor of English, writes that, “Israel’s defenders
consistently argued that it was ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and that
it alone among the countries in the region lived up to Western standards of human
rights protections. But this was true only for Jews. Israeli Palestinians may
have had more recognized rights than most of the citizens of the Arab
dictatorships surrounding it—-a point Israel’s defenders never tired of making—-
but when it came to actually enforcing those rights, they often proved a mirage.
Israeli Palestinians could not remotely depend on the web of legal protections,
personal relationships , and military, judicial and police sympathies that their
fellow Jewish citizens took for granted.”
Alterman notes that, “Israel’s official investigation into the lives of its Arab
inhabitants in 2003, known as the Or Commission Report, found that they could not
depend on its police force to 'demonstrate systematic and egalitarian enforcement
of the law.' This was another way of describing the persistent institutional
discrimination Arabs had faced since the state’s founding. Human rights groups
won an important victory when in 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the
‘routine’ torture of prisoners was illegal. In any case, the violence-minded
settlers were more than happy to take matters into their own hands. Palestinians
on the West Bank lived a life of near lawlessness between local authorities,
roving gangs of self-appointed enforcers. Islamic decrees and both Israeli troops
and Jewish vigilantes.”
Tony Judt, a British-born Jewish historian who had lived in Israel as a young man
and served ss a volunteer in the IDF auxiliary, published an essay in 2003 in the
New York Review of Books titled “Israel: The Alternative.” In it he argued that
Israel had “imported a characteristically late-nineteenth century separatist
project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open
frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ —-a state in
which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-
Jewish citizens are forever excluded—-is rooted in another time and place.
Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”
A Complicated Birthday
As Israel approached its 75th anniversary in April, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
(April 20, 2023) headlined its report, “For American Jews Planning the Birthday
Party Has Gotten Complicated.” In Seattle, for example, Congregation Kol Ami
partnered with UnXeptable, a group of expat Israeli activists who have been
protesting for months against the Israeli government’s plan to overhaul the
country’s judiciary and planned what they called “A family gathering Honoring
Israeli Democracy.” There, congregants planned to study Israel’s Declaration of
Independence and sign a new copy to “rededicate” it. Seattle Rabbi Yohanna
Kinberg said that an uncomplicated celebration would be “sort of like celebrating
the Fourth of July if we’re in the middle of a civil war.”
The umbrella group for North America’s Jewish Federations, which held its
national convention in Israel in April to coincide with the 75th anniversary
celebration, rejected calls to disinvite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu as a speaker. In the end, Netanyahu canceled his appearance because of
growing demonstrations and opposition to his presence.
In a widely read article, Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah, the Rabbinic Call For
Human Rights, an organization that trains and mobilizes more than 2,300 rabbis,
argued that the way to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Israel was “by
fighting for it to live up to its ideals.”
“Much to mourn and protest”
In her view, while “there is much to celebrate” on this anniversary, there is
also “much to mourn and protest, beginning with the 56 year-old occupation that
violates the human rights of Palestinians every single day; the ongoing
discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahi and Ethiopian
Jews, asylum seekers and foreign workers; and, this year, the all-out attack on
democracy by the current government….For the last four months, hundreds of
thousands of Israelis have been in the street every week protesting the efforts
of the current government to eliminate the power of the High Court to serve as a
check on legislation that violates Israel’s Basic Laws, the closest thing the
country has to a constitution. And yet the response by too much of the American
Jewish community has been more or less business as usual. While many legacy
organizations have issued tepid statements criticizing attempts to destroy the
judiciary, these groups have not rallied American Jews to actively oppose this
coup or taken actions that would put direct pressure on the Israeli government.”
Rabbi Jacobs lamented the fact that the Jewish Federations welcomed far-right
Knesset member Simcha Rothman, the architect of limits on the judiciary, to
address the group. She asks, “Why are American Jews so terrified to protest
Israeli actions, even when the country is being taken over by people whose values
are anathema to most of ours?”
She cites Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the influential, prophetic, Orthodox Jewish
thinker at Hebrew University, who warned of the danger that the nascent state of
Israel would become an object of worship for Jews, replacing God. “The state,”
he wrote, “fulfills an essential need of the individual and the national
community, but it does not thereby acquire intrinsic value—-except for a fascist
who regards sovereignty, governmental authority, and power as supreme values.”
In a 1991 lecture, he went so far as to call any religious Jews who supported
occupation and the building settlements on the West Bank “descendants of the
worshippers of the Golden Calf, who proclaimed ‘This is your God, Israel.’ A
calf doesn’t necessarily need to be golden. It can also be a people, a land or a
state.”
“Settler movement…now runs the state”
Sadly, Rabbi Jacobs notes, “In Israel, the religious settler movement that
Leibowitz disparaged three decades ago now runs the state and—-as he warned—-its
agenda puts the occupation of land first, and the treatment of people second…Many
Jews in the U.S. find it hard to see that reality because the State of Israel has
become an object of worship, rather than a real country where real people live
and where fascist-leaning politicians are working to fundamentally change its
government and culture into something unrecognizable and dangerous. American
Jewish conversations about Israel too often become conversations about Jewish
identity, a slippery slope that makes it easy for criticism of the State of
Israel—-a political entity subject to international human rights standards—-to be
misinterpreted as attacks on Jews generally. It is easier to celebrate a fantasy
with no hard edges than deal with the reality of a beloved, but flawed, state…
Real celebration of Israel demands fighting for it to live up to the highest aims
of democracy, dignity and human rights for all.”
At the Jerusalem gathering of Jewish Federations in Jerusalem, Rabbi Marc Baker,
CEO of the Boston area’s Jewish Federation, said, “We’re living at a time of so
many crises and so much painful brokenness, it can feel like things are falling
apart, like, at best, as leaders, we’re just trying to hold things together.”
Yohanan Plesher, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute think tank, said
that, “For the first time, at Israel’s 75th birthday, a government is trying to
fundamentally alter the definition of a Jewish state.” Referring to efforts to
restrict immigration to Israel and proposals to limit the role of the judiciary,
as well as continuing occupation of the West Bank, he declared, “If this cluster
of changes would be implemented, I’m not sure that in the 80th year of our
national birthday, the General Assembly will decide again to conduct its event
here.”
In November 2015, Commentary magazine held a symposium on the subject of “What
Will the condition of the Jewish community be fifty years from now?” One of most
perceptive responses came from Rabbi Jacob Neusner, an academic scholar of
Judaism who taught at Bard College and was a visiting professor at such
institutions as Dartmouth College, Brandeis University and Brown University.
“Israel’s flag is not mine”
Rabbi Neusner makes clear that, “Israel’s flag is not mine. My homeland is
America.” He declares: “…nothing in my scholarship—-not the history of the Jews
of Babylonia or the sages of Yavneh—-speak meaningfully to the context of the
United States. We as Jews have never lived so comfortably and freely. We have
no historical analogy to draw on.”
Rabbi Neusner provides this assessment: “For now, the Judaisms of Shoah memory
and ethnic identity and Israel affinity are ascendant, but as we know, those
Judaisms have limited appeal and they do not do a good job of answering the
questions that create a religious system…The Judaism that endures is the one that
exists wherever people seek to discover the answers to questions that run much
deeper: What is a good life? How should we act? What is expected of us… I
don’t know when American Jewry will turn back toward Judaism for answers to those
urgent questions, or when they will place the word of God above the judgment of
any man including themselves. But I am optimistic that such a Judaism will
return —-and may even be returning. A Judaism that is vital, that looks inward
and depends not on political Jerusalem, or the vestigial memories of the lower
East Side or the ashes of Auschwitz. Instead, it will be a Judaism rooted in
spiritual purpose and textual depth, the questions that have shaped all human
history and all theological experience. In the past 50 years, such a Judaism was
a whisper in America. But tomorrow it may be a song, and who can know who will
sing the first chords?”
Though no one can know how the current ferment within American Judaism will
evolve, it seems clear that Zionism is in retreat. Its advocates will have to
come to grips with the manner in which it distorted history and created a story
of the creation of the state of Israel and its treatment of Palestine’s
indigenous population which bears no relation to reality. For Judaism, it is
becoming increasingly clear, Zionism was a dangerous wrong turn. *
|