[Salon] The American—and Jewish—Divide Over Israel

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

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Altercation: The American—and Jewish—Divide Over Israel

November 18, 2022

I think it’s important to name names. You will, for instance, read a great deal about the antics of the likes of The New Republic’s Martin Peretz, Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz, and both William Safire and A. M. Rosenthal of The New York Times. Each deployed the power and influence they enjoyed in the media to vilify the reputations of those they deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel, as well as often deploying racist tropes to attack Israel’s Arab critics and opponents.

But I do not hold the Palestinian side to be entirely innocent victims. Rather, I judge Palestinian leadership and their champions in the discourse to be sorely lacking in realism, and, for that reason, unhelpful to the people who so desperately need a voice in the debate. However much the Palestinians and their supporters believe themselves to have justice on their side, the fact is that Israel has always been the far stronger party in this conflict. It has won 14 or 15 wars—depending on how you count them—and will continue to do so as long as these wars continue. Israel’s point of view is rarely challenged in Congress or the executive branch or, until recently, on most of the nation’s editorial pages. Given this fantastic power imbalance, the Palestinian side has never faced up to the reality of the situation and set actually achievable goals for itself. Rather its leaders and spokespeople aim for mere rhetorical victories that do little or nothing to improve the lives of the people for whom they profess to speak. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, so popular among college students and leftist publications and organizations, is just the latest manifestation of this doomed strategy and one that has, so far, led absolutely nowhere.

Moreover, there’s the price that American Jews have paid for what the Jewish scholar and rabbi Shaul Magid has termed the “Zionization” of the American Jewish identity. Ever since the 1967 war, American Jewish institutions have focused almost all of their resources on a combination of Israel support and Holocaust remembrance (which has become a subsidiary of Israel support). Lately, they have embraced a focus on antisemitism: certainly a legitimate concern, but one that pro-Israel groups often exaggerate and exploit in order to try to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli actions.

What has been lost is not only American Judaism’s previous focus on social justice and social services but any attention to the substance of what it means to be an American Jew or why a young person, given the choice, would want to remain one. Defining one’s Jewish identity exclusively as support for Israel, however vicarious, was certainly understandable in the wake of the Holocaust, especially given the desperate condition of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had survived Hitler’s mass murder and had nowhere else to go. The new state needed help, and American Jews needed a post-Holocaust reason for optimism about the future as well as a means to shake off the shame of having failed the Jews of Europe.

But Israel long ago ceased to serve as a unifying cause for American Jews and has become, instead, a deeply divisive one. What’s more, while Israel was initially understood to be a place of refuge for endangered diaspora Jews, it now is the cause of many a violent attack on them by angry Arabs and other Palestinian partisans. These are just a few of the many reasons secular organized Jewry in the United States is in crisis today, especially when judged by the large-scale exodus of so many Jews—especially young Jews—from both of what have been historically by far the most popular American Jewish institutions, Conservative synagogues and Reform temples.

The book is called We Are Not One because we can no longer paper over all of these differences. Despite an economic and social profile that should put them in the conservative camp, Jews remain by far America’s most liberal white ethnic group. Israel, once admired as a sort of socialist Sparta, has become an increasingly illiberal nation that, over a series of five elections in little more than three years, has elected right-wing government after right-wing government; none of which have shown the slightest interest in making any concessions toward the possibility of a two-state solution. Israel is the only remotely democratic country on Earth whose citizens prefer Donald Trump to either Barack Obama or Joe Biden; with numbers almost perfectly reversed from those of the preferences of American Jews. And again, the divergence is most pronounced among the young.

Self-described “pro-Israel” organizations like AIPAC, whose political action committee supported the re-election of 109 election deniers and insurrectionists in 2022, ask American Jews to ignore these truths as Israel prepares under its corrupt leader, Bibi Netanyahu, to form a government even more illiberal, theocratic, and hostile to peace and the Palestinians than in the past. The recent announcement by the FBI that it will open an investigation into the killing of the veteran Al Jazeera journalist and American citizen Shireen Abu Akleh during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank last May, and the announcement by Defense Minister Benny Gantz that Israel will not cooperate with the investigation, is a clear demonstration of the sorts of conflicts we can expect in the future.