AMERICAN JUDAISM IS IN TURMOIL AS ZIONISM APPEARS TO BE A MISTAKEN PATH
BY
ALLAN C.BROWNFELD
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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.’”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.