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.’”
“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,” he wrote, “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 of 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.
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