The coming crisis in relations between Israel and American Jews has many roots. Most news accounts attribute it to Benjamin Netanyahu’s desperate need to cater to the demands of his extremist partners in order to avoid prosecution for alleged crimes committed during his previous time as prime minister.
The result of Netanyahu’s need to elude justice will almost certainly be a far-right coalition government that will push Israel even further in the direction of illiberalism, theocracy and permanent occupation of the West Bank: one that will further entrench those practices that fit the International Criminal Court’s definition of “apartheid.”
Given the fact that most American Jews remain committed to their liberal principles – a fact often ignored by the multiple organizations that profess to represent them politically – these changes will almost certainly lead to profound anguish and alienation on the part of millions of people whose personal identities have long been defined by the tension between their liberalism and their Zionism.
But it should also inspire a fundamental reconsideration of the terms of the historic relationship between the two communities that make up approximately 80 percent of the Jewish world.
The painful truth for American Jews is that while they have tended to worship Israeli Jews, their “cousins” have, historically, returned this feeling with a combination of amusement and contempt.
As the late, great Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell once observed, Zionist ideology, with its doctrine of shlilat ha’golah (the negation of the Diaspora), “at times resembled [that] of the most rabid antisemites” – and this goes double for the perceived wealthy, comfortable and spoiled American Diaspora.
This view spanned the Zionist ideological spectrum, with thinker A. D. Gordon – considered one of Labor Zionism’s most influential early writers and thinkers – describing Diaspora Jewish life as the “parasitism of a fundamentally useless people.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, called them “ugly, sickly Yids,” and the beloved liberal novelist A. B. Yehoshua mocked American Jews for only “playing with Jewishness” while Israelis lived it every day.
Israelis are particularly contemptuous of American-Jewish religious practices. In 2017, Shlomo Amar, Israel’s former Sephardi chief rabbi, called Reform Jews – by far the largest religious denomination for American Jews – “worse than Holocaust deniers.” This followed the 2016 comment by Israel’s then-Deputy Education Minister Meir Porush that Reform Jews praying at the Western Wall “should be sent out to the dogs.”
Is it any wonder that no Israeli government believes it can survive if it enacts any reforms at the Kotel to suit the needs of even Conservative (much less Reform) Jews?
Since the 1940s, American Jews have idolized the “New Jew” that Zionism created. How could they not? Israelis really did win wars, make the desert bloom, revive the Hebrew language and create the first Jewish commonwealth in 2,000 years out of the ashes of the greatest catastrophe to befall the Jewish people in their history.
Of course, much was left out of this narrative – most profoundly, events related both to the Nakba and Israel’s profoundly discriminatory treatment of the more than 20 percent of its population that now identifies as Palestinian Israeli.
But for instance, when Leon Uris set out to add a new chapter to the Bible – his fairy-tale novel “Exodus,” published in 1958 and followed by the film two years later – many American Jews embraced the story even more intensely than they did actual scripture. They helped make it one of the best-selling books of all time and a smash hit movie.
Israelis were happy to take advantage of this, though they found it ridiculous. Then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion admitted that Uris’ novel suffered from the author’s “lack of talent” when judged as a work of fiction. But “as a piece of propaganda,” he thought it “the greatest thing ever written about Israel.”
Foreign Minister Golda Meir (and Ben-Gurion’s future successor) concurred. On a fund-raising trip to the United States, she found “there was no meeting where the book was not mentioned.” While she admitted that the novel contained “a lot of kitsch,” she expected it would prove to be “of greater importance than all of the ministers’ visits and even 60 years of Zionism, and of all the propaganda and publicity.”
The head of Israel’s Tourism Ministry remarked: “We could have thrown away all the promotional literature we printed in the last two years and just circulated ‘Exodus.’” El Al offered Americans a 16-day “Exodus” tour, where, according to one wag, “they swallow the novel … and think everyone here dances the Hora constantly and goes around making courageous postures.”
Writing about the film, the Israeli gadfly-peacenik-journalist Uri Avnery reacted to what he called its “revolting kitsch,” which turned Israelis into “ridiculous cowboys” manifesting “all the clichés, cheap superlatives and hyped-up descriptions parroted by tourist guides or fund raisers at Zionist schnorrer events.”
What upset him most was the manner in which both the novel and film invited self-hatred on the part of Diaspora – especially American – Jews. They incorporated, Avnery said, “all the secret longings of the conflicted Galut Jew from the American ghetto, all the inferiority complexes of a man who deals all his life with contempt.”
These feelings have been a staple of the Israeli/American-Jewish relationship. Back in November 1985, American Jews found themselves caught in a very special nightmare when the news broke that U.S. authorities had arrested an American Jew and his wife for spying on the U.S. government for Israel. Jonathan Pollard was a veritable Frankenstein’s monster come to life: a Julius and Ethel Rosenberg-style case, but with Zionism playing the role originally cast for international communism.
Israelis, yet again, were decidedly unimpressed by their American cousins’ sensitivities. The government in Jerusalem by and large stymied attempts to bring any of Pollard’s Israeli collaborators to justice. Liberal scholar and longtime government minister Shlomo Avineri, meanwhile, mocked what he judged to be the “nervousness, insecurity and even cringing” of American Jews before their gentile neighbors. Netanyahu met Pollard as a national hero at Ben-Gurion Airport when he was finally freed and arrived on one of Sheldon Adelson’s many jets in December 2020.
Israeli leaders have consistently instructed American Jews to support U.S. governments they detest due to their support for Israel. Then-U.S. Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin did so for the antisemite Richard Nixon in 1972, and Netanyahu continued this tradition for the even more antisemitic Donald Trump nearly half a century later.
When, for instance, Trump and Netanyahu held a joint press conference in February 2017, an Israeli journalist mentioned the rise in antisemitic incidents since Trump’s election and asked whether his administration was “playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones.” Netanyahu stepped in to swear that “there is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state than President Donald Trump.”
Trump had not even been in office 30 days at the time. Yet just a few weeks earlier, in his remarks on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he had somehow failed to mention the fact that any of the victims were Jews. (This is a favored tactic of “soft” Holocaust denialism.)
When asked about Trump’s conspicuous omission, the man who fancied himself the representative of all the world’s Jews could only repeat: “This man is a great friend of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.” American Jews’ concerns about him were therefore “misplaced.”
With the advent of a government that cares nothing for their concerns and looks ready to tell many of them that they do not legally qualify insofar as the Law of Returnis concerned, American Jews are about to learn that their understanding of Israelis’ opinion of them is also “misplaced.”
The “Exodus” era is over and the future is as yet unwritten.
Historian Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and the author of 12 books, including “We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel,” just published by Basic Books.