ISRAEL’S MOVEMENT AWAY FROM DEMOCRACY ACCELERATES RETREAT OF
JEWISH AMERICANS FROM ZIONISM
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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Israel’s far-right government has made its goals clear. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Dec. 30, 2022, “These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me. The Jewish people have an exclusive right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel—-in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”
The government, which includes far-right parties which oppose LGBTQ rights, equality for women, religious rights for non-Orthodox Jews and support annexation of the occupied territories and expulsion of most of its Palestinian residents, is clearly turning its back on democracy. It plans to control the Supreme Court so that racist legislation can no longer be prevented from taking effect.
The Washington Post (Jan. 15, 2023) provided this assessment: “In 2019, Netanyahu was indicted on multiple charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, and is currently on trial in three cases of corruption. In Jan. 2022, Aryeh Deri, the head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party who has been appointed interior minister and minister of health, was convicted of tax fraud. Ben Gvir, a West Bank settler leader who has for decades defended Israeli youths accused of violently attacking Palestinians, was deemed unfit for mandatory military service because of his extremist activism and was convicted for racist incitement against Arabs and support of terrorist groups…Netanyahu’s proposed ‘judicial revision’ …would allow ministers greater influence over who serves on the courts—-including those overseeing Netanyahu’s corruption trial.”
No Checks On Government
Mordechai Kremnitzer, a respected Israeli jurist and professor of law at Hebrew University, said this of the new government: “The king can do no wrong. There are no checks on the government. We are in the midst of an attempt by the political majority to perpetuate regime change, transforming Israel from a country with a functional liberal democracy to a populist-authoritarian, nationalist-religious nation characterized principally by absolute power in the hands of the majority.”
Establishment American Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations say that they are taking a “wait and see” attitude about the new government, which they say is a product of Israel’s “democratic” system. Many Jewish voices are taking a far different position.
In December, more than 330 American rabbis, including some who occupy prominent roles in major cities, pledged to block members of the Religious Zionist bloc in the Israeli government from speaking in their synagogues and will lobby to keep them from speaking in their communities. The signatures come from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. There are no Orthodox signatories.
Signatories Include Prominent Rabbis
Among the signatories are current and former members of the Boards of Rabbis in Chicago and Los Angeles and rabbis who lead the largest Reform and Conservative congregations in Washington, D.C. The letter was organized by David Deutch, a leading Reconstructionist rabbi in Philadelphia and John Rosove, the rabbi emeritus of Temple Israel in Los Angeles.
The letter outlines five Religious Zionist proposals that it says will cause irreparable harm to the relations between Israel and Jewish Americans. These include changing the Law of Return to keep out non-Orthodox converts and their descendants; eroding LGBTQ rights; allowing the Knesset to override rulings of the Supreme Court; annexing the West Bank; and expelling Arab citizens who oppose Israel’s government.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Anshe Chesed in Manhattan will no longer recite the prayer for the State of Israel that many synagogues feature at worship services. He says he can no longer pray for the success of Israel’s leaders, ministers and advisers since it includes right-wing extremists he considers “akin to the Ku Klux Klan.” He declares: “I don’t hope that this government succeeds. I hope that this government fails and is replaced by something better. I just could not imagine us saying this prayer that their efforts be successful. I think their efforts are dastardly.”
New Government Is “A Nightmare”.
Rabbi Noah Sattath, director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said in January, during a Webinar with Americans for Peace Now, that anyone who is contributing to the Israeli economy should stop “until the wind changes.” She said that the new government is “a nightmare” for human rights groups and for Palestinians under occupation. Rabbi Sattath was featured at the J Street conference in December 2022 and at that time discussed the possibility that she would call for U.S. sanctions against the new government. Israel, she said, is now in a period of “shock and awe.”
Abraham Foxman, 82, the past leader of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who has said that “nothing could separate him from support for Israel,” now says, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (Dec. 2, 2022), “The leaders of an extreme party could do the trick if they get their way…I never thought I would reach that point where I would say that my support for Israel is conditional.” In an interview with The Forward (Nov. 25, 2022), he said, “I’ve always said my support for Israel is unconditional. I don’t think it’s a horrific condition to say, ‘I love Israel as a Jewish and democratic state that respects pluralism. If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.’”
Foxman said his outlook reflected that of the larger American Jewish community. A Holocaust survivor, Foxman retired from the ADL in 2015, fifty years after first joining the organization. Of Israel’s move to the far-right, he laments, “It’s not one thing. It’s a whole package of things, which is bringing us back to the Middle Ages. It’s undermining democracy in terms of the legal system, it’s cutting back on human or legal rights for all, whether it’s LGBTQ, the Conservative movement of the Reform movement.”
Independence Of The Judiciary
Jodi Rudoren, editor of The Forward (Jan. 6, 2023) wrote: “Itamar Ben Gvir’s senseless, audacious pilgrimage to the Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock compound…certainly is a harbinger (of what will happen). I am worried about the independence of the judiciary, about the new government’s threats to LGBTQ people and plans to redefine who is considered Jewish under Israeli law and, of course, about the ongoing, escalating violence against Palestinians.”
Consider the case of Hillel Halkin, an author and translator who moved to Israel from the U.S. in 1970. He is the author of “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic,” which won a National Jewish Book Award in 1978. In the book, he urges American Jews to emigrate to Israel. Now, Halkin, 83, admits that he was wrong. Writing in the Jewish Review of Books, he declares that critics of Zionism were correct.
Today, he writes, “We’re over the cliff and falling…nothing will save it (Israel) from the abyss of messianic right-wing politics.” Israel, he laments, avoided the central issue of Palestinian rights. To an anti-Zionist friend with whom he argued over the years, he wrote, “You’ve won the argument. For years now, Israel has seemed to me like a man sleepwalking toward a cliff. Now, we’ve fallen from it.” Sadly, he notes, racism has come to dominate Israeli politics and, as a result, “Israel is headed to disaster.”
“Against The Idea Of Rule Of Law”
Tom Ginsburg, professor of international law at the University of Chicago, in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (Jan. 9, 2023) provided this assessment of the Netanyahu government’s plan for the Israeli legal system: “You could have a situation where the Knesset—-which currently has a role in protecting human rights—-can pick out and override specific cases, which goes against the idea of rule of law.” He noted that similar changes have occurred in Hungary and Poland, “which are not necessarily countries you want to compare yourself to…I honestly worry about whether this society will remain a Jewish and democratic one with the current coalition…The ethno-nationalist direction of the country bothers me as a Jew.”
Former Israeli deputy Supreme Court Justice president Elyakum Rubinstein warned that the controversial package of sweeping legal changes proposed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin would leave Israel with just one branch of government, the executive, and hollow out Israeli democracy. Rubinstein and other Israeli critics say the proposals would remove all checks on executive power. In Rubinstein’s view, “There is a principle of checks and balances (on government power) and a concept of executive restraint that governments sometimes do not follow, resulting in harm to minorities and weaker sectors of society. If there is only one branch of government instead of three, then it will be a democracy in name, but will it be a democracy in the substantive understanding of the idea?”
In what the Times of Israel (Jan. 12, 2023) called “an extraordinary speech delivered with indignation and fiery rhetoric,” the President of the Israeli Supreme Court Esther Hayut denounced the new government’s plan to radically overhaul Israel’s judicial and legal system, saying it would deal “a fatal blow”. To the country’s democratic identity. She said the changes would totally undermine judicial independence, give the Knesset a “blank check” to pass any legislation it pleases—-even in violation of basic civil rights. In her talk to the conference of the Israeli Association of Public Law, she said, “This is an unbridled attack on the judicial system, as if it were an enemy that must be attacked and subdued. This is a plan to crush the justice system. It is designed to deal a fatal blow to the independence of the judiciary and silence it.” She concluded by stating that, “If it is passed, the 75th anniversary of Israel’s independence will be remembered as the year in which the country’s democratic identity was dealt a fatal blow.”
Dershowitz Opposes Judicial Reforms
Even Prof. Alan Dershowitz, long a staunch defender of Israeli policies, said he cannot defend sweeping judicial reforms, including allowing lawmakers to pass laws that the Supreme Court has already struck down. Dershowitz said the reforms pose a threat to civil liberties and minority rights in Israel. “if I were in Israel, I would be joining the protests,” Dershowitz told Israeli Army Radio, referring to the protests in Tel Aviv on Jan. 7 against the reforms that drew thousands. “It will make it much more difficult for people like me who try to defend Israel in the international court of public opinion to defend them effectively. It would be a tragedy to see the Supreme Court weakened.”
A number of American Jewish groups spoke out against including the extremist faction in the government while Netanyahu was negotiating with the bloc and more have done so since he announced the government’s formation. They include the major non-Orthodox religious movements and the liberal Jewish Middle East policy groups, including Partners for Progressive Israel, the Israel Policy Forum, J Street, IfNotNow and Americans for Peace Now.
Few Americans understand the extreme racist nature of religious Zionism, which now plays an important role in Israel’s government. These Jewish fundamentalists show their total contempt toward non-Jews. Rabbi Kook the Elder, the revered father of the messianic tendency in religious Zionism, said, “The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews—-all of them in all different levels—-is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
The Superiority Of The Jewish Soul
Rabbi Kook’s entire teaching, which is followed devoutly by, among others, those who have led the settler movement on the West Bank, is based upon the Lurianic Cabala, the school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late 16th to the early 19th century. One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabala, the world was created solely for the sake of the Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, an American-born activist rabbi on the West Bank, speaks freely of Jews’ spiritual superiority over non-Jews. “If you saw two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first,” Ginsburgh states. “Every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA…If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.”
In the book “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel,” Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky provide a thorough assessment of this phenomenon in modern Israel. Shahak was an Israeli and Holocaust survivor. He was a professor at the Hebrew University and a leading human rights activist. Norton Mezvinsky was a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University who has written and lectured extensively on the modern Middle East. Concerning Fabbi Ginsburgh’s position, they point out that, “Changing the words ‘Jewish’ to ‘German’ or ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Jewish’ to ‘Jewish’ turns the Ginsburgh position into the doctrine that made Auschwitz possible in the past…The similarities between the Jewish messianic trend and German Nazism are glaring. The Gentiles are for the messianists what the Jews were for the Nazis. The hatred of Western culture with its rational and democratic elements is common to both movements.”
“we Shall Never Move Out”
Author Milton Viorst, in his book “What shall I Do With This People?,” writes that, “Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook declared that, ‘Under heavenly command, we have just returned home in the elevations of holiness and our holy city. We shall never move out of here. We are living in the middle of redemption. The entire Israeli Army is holy. The kingdom of Israel is being rebuilt. It symbolizes raw rule of the Jewish people on its land.’ Kook and his followers reshaped Halacha (religious law) to serve their political ideology. Not only did they insist that the law required permanent Jewish rule in the territories, but they proclaimed its supremacy over secular law…Religious Zionism’s role was to sanctify…nationalism, imparting new energy to it by characterizing it as God’s command. Religious Zionism after 1967 sparked the Jewish settlement movement in the occupied trrritories…Every stake driven into the soil, it maintained, served God’s will.
Zionism was a minority movement among Jews until the advent of Nazism and the Holocaust. For Reform Jews, the idea of Zionism contradicted almost completely their belief in a universal prophetic Judaism. The first Reform prayerbook eliminated all references to Jews being in exile and to a Messiah who would miraculously restore Jews throughout the world to the historic land of Israel and who would rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. The prayerbook eliminated all prayers for a return to Zion. Abraham Geiger, the distinguished rabbi and author, argued that Judaism developed through an evolutionary process that had begun with God’s revelation to the Hebrew prophets. That revelation was progressive; new truth became available to every generation. The underlying and unchanging essence of Judaism was ethical monotheism. The Jewish people were a religious community destined to carry on the mission to “serve as a light to the nations,” to bear witness to God and His moral law. The dispersion of the Jews was not a punishment for their sins, but part of God’s plan whereby they were to disseminate the universal message of ethical monotheism.
In Nov. 1885, Reform rabbis,meeting in Pittsburgh, wrote an eight point platform that one participant called “the most succinct _expression_ of the theology of the Reform movement that had ever been published in the world.” The platform emphasized that Reform Judaism denied nationalism of any variety. It stated: “We recognize in the era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation , but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” This was the philosophy of Reform Judaism embraced by the Union of American Hebrew Cingregations.
“America is our Zion”
In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution declared, “Zion was a precious possession of the past…as such it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion.”
In 1904, The American Israelite noted, “There is not one solitary prominent native Jewish American who is an advocate of Zionism.”
In 1919, in response to Britain’s Balfour Declaration calling for a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine, a petition was presented to President Woodrow Wilson entitled “A Statement to the Peace Conference.” It reflected the dominant American Jewish view on Zionism and Palestine. The petition criticized Zionist efforts to segregate Jews “as a political unit…in Palestine or elsewhere,” and underlined the principle of equal rights for all citizens of any state “irrespective of creed or ethnic descent.” It rejected Jewish nationalism as a general concept and held against the founding of any state “upon the basis of religion and/or race.”
The petition asserted that the “overwhelming bulk of the Jews of America , England, France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland and the other lands of freedom have no thought whatever of surrendering their citizenship in those lands in order to resort to a ‘Jewish homeland in Lalestine.’” Among those signing this petition were Rep. Julius Klein of California, Henry Morganthau, Sr., former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Simon W. Rosendale, former Attorney General of New York, Mayor L.H. Kempner of Galveston, Texas, E.M. Baker, president of the New York Stock Exchange, Jesse I. Straus of Macy’s, and New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs.
Jews Are Not A Nation
In a speech to the Menorah Society in New York City in Dec. 1917, Chief Judge of the New York Dtate Supreme Court Irving Lehman, brother of Governor Herbert Lehman of New York, stated: “I cannot recognize that the Jews as such constitute a nation in any sense in which the word is recognized in political science, or that a national basis is a possible concept for modern Judaism. We Jews in America, bound to the Jews of other lands by our common faith, constituting our common inheritance, cannot as American citizens feel any bond to them as members of a nation, for nationally we are Americans and Americans only, and in political and civil matters, we cannot recognize any other ties. We must therefore look for the maintenance of Judaism to those spiritual concepts which constitute Judaism.”
In ENGLAND, A Jewish member of Lloyd George’s cabinet, Secretarynof State for India Edwin Montagu, insisted that Jews be regarded as a religious community. In a memorandum circulated to other Cabinet members, Montagu used the word “anti-Semitism” to characterize the sponsors of thevBalfour Declaration. The document of Aug. 23, 1917 was titled, “The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government.”
He noted that, “I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will,prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world…I assert that there is not a Jewish nation…It is no more true to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation…I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews. It is quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in Mohammedans history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country in Christian history…The Government should be prepared to do everything in their power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs. I would ask that tge Government should go no further.”
Orthodox Jews Reject Zionism
Zionism was also rejected by Orthodox Jews. In 1929, Orthodox Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamarat wrote that the very notion of a sovereign Jewish state as a spiritual center was “a contradiction to Judaism’s ultimate purpose.” He noted that, “Judaism at root is not some religious concentration which may be localized or situated in a single territory. Neither is Judaism a ‘nationality,’. In the sense of modern nationalism, fit to be woven into the three-foldedness of ‘homeland, army and heroic sings.’ No, Judaism is Torah, ethics and exaltation of spirit. If Judaism is truly Torah, then it cannot be reduced to the confines of any particular territory. For as Scripture said of Torah, ‘Its measure is greater than the earth.’”
To the question of whether Jews constitute “a people,” Yeshayahua Leibovitz, the Orthodox Jewish thinker and Hebrew University professor, provides this assessment: “The historical Jewish people was defined neither as a race, nor a people of this country or that, nor as a people that speaks the same language, but as the people of Torah Judaism and its commandments…The words spoken by Rabbi Saadia Gaon (882-942) more than a thousand years ago: ‘Our nation exists only within the Torah’ have not only a normative but also an empirical meaning. They testified to a historical reality whose power could be felt up until the 19th century. It was then that the fracture , which has not ceased to widen with time, first occurred: the fissure between Jewishness and Judaism.
One of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. for civil rights for all people, said, “Judaism is not a religion of space and does not worship the soil. so, too, the State of Israel is not the climax of Jewish history but a test of the integrity of the Jewish people and the competence of Israel.”
Einstein Warns Against “Narrow Nationalism”
In 1938, Albert Einstein warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create a state imbued with “a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly even without a Jewish state.”
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber spoke out in 1942 against the “aim of the minority to ‘conquer’ territory by means of internationa maneuvers.” Then teaching at Hebrew University, Buber was in Jerusalem in the midst of the hostilities that broke out after Israel unilaterally declared independence in May, 1948. He cried with despair, “This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name of Zion; it is nothing more than one of the crude forms of nationalism.”
Slowly, after World War ll, American Judaism transformed itself from a religion of universal values which worshiped a God who had created men and women of every race and nation to an Israel-centered religion in which the State of Israel often appeared to be the object of worship, much like the golden calf in the Bible. Israeli flags appeared in synagogues and promoting Israel became the major goal of Jewish organizations. Some critics pointed this out, but they were silenced or ignored. Some observers expressed the fear that Judaism was losing all spiritual content.
Support For Israel Became “A Secular Religion”
In 1988, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who had headed the American Jewish Congress, wrote in the New York Review of Books: “American Jews preferred to see Israel as it was depicted by Leon Uris in ‘Exodus,’ in which Israelis were painted as totally noble and Arabs were the Middle Eastern equivelant of the murderous Indians of Hollywood westerns. When support for Israel became the ‘secular religion’ of most American Jews, Israel had to be presented as a homeland that was superior to all other homelands. Most American Jews have not wanted to know what was really happening in Israel. Now they found themselves face to face with the uncomfortable fact that there is a right-wing in Israel that is so insistent on its ideology that it would rather live amid violence than search for compromises.”
Benjamin Netanyahu makes it clear that Israel is not the liberal democracy Jewish Americans thought it was. Even before his new government was elected, younger American Jews were growing increasingly alienated from the ethnocentrism which had replaced universalism in Jewish life. One observer of these trends is Eric Alterman, for many years media columnist for The Nation and now a professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College (CUNY).
Speaking at Tel Aviv University in May, 2022, Alterman declared that Israel had lost American liberals and that Judaism itself is in crisis because its only content is “pro-Israelism.” He declared: “Israel has lost the left…and it can’t get it back as long as it has the occupation…It’s building 4,000 new settlements. It’s doing terrible things each day…Israel has lost American Jews and liberals because it has no content to offer besides the stale ‘Everyone hates the Jews’ propaganda that is meaningless to young Jews…what American Jews see, they don’t like…American Jewish youth are walking away from Judaism…because Judaism has no answers for them.” It could all be different, he suggested, if instead of promoting Israel, Jewish institutions would focus on “the wonders of Jewish history and culture.”
Early Jewish Critics Of Zionism Were Prophetic
Before the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, Zionism was a minority view in the American Jewish community. Recent developments indicate that it is on its way to becoming a minority view once again. This will be a positive development for Judaism as a religion of universal values, for the integrity of U.S. foreign policy and for the human rights of the Palestinian people. It is particularly encouraging to Jewish opponents of Zionism such as the American Council for Judaism, which celebrated its 80th anniversary last year. It is increasingly clear that the early Jewish critics of Zionism were indeed prophetic. It, and other critics of Zionism, has kept alive an older humane Jewish moral and ethical tradition which now once again has an opportunity to emerge. **
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Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and serves
as editor of ISSUES. The author of five books, he has served on the
staff of the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and the Office of
the Vice President.
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