In her column, “The unbearable loneliness of Israel” (Washington Post, April 5, 2024), Ruth Marcus, reporting on a trip with her synagogue to Israel, quotes an IDF soldier as lamenting “the existential Loneliness of Israel.”
While the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7 has, quite properly, been widely condemned, Israel’s response, including the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, has resulted in the death of many thousands of civilians, including large numbers of women and children. This has been achieved with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for massive military aid, even as President Biden expresses quiet concern about the slaughter of civilians.
Ms. Marcus ignores the history of Palestine, the terrorism inflicted on Palestinians by the early Zionists, as in the Deir Yassin massacre, which caused more than 750,000 to flee their homes. In the eyes of more and more Jewish Americans, Israel’s treatment of the indigenous population of Palestine is a clear violation of Jewish moral and ethical values.
Prof. Noah Feldman of Harvard, author of the book, “To Be A Jew Today,” declares: “Today, many progressive American Jews find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no realistic prospect of liberal rights.”
Oren Kroc-Zeldin, director of Jewish Studies at the University of San Francisco, points out that, “Jewish liberation in Israel was predicated on the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” Shaul Magid, professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, declares that, “The Zionist narrative…cultivates an exclusivity and proprietary ethos that too easily slides into ethnonational chauvinism.”
Did Ruth Marcus and her fellow synagogue members visit the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians, in the words of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, are living under “apartheid?”
Sadly, too many American synagogues display Israeli flags on their pulpits and seem to place the state of Israel in the position of a virtual object of worship, a form of paganism much like the Golden Calf in the Bible. This is not Judaism, which is a religion of universal values dedicated to the long Jewish moral and ethical tradition.
Ruth Marcus expresses concern about Israel’s “existential loneliness.” What about the millions of Palestinians who have been displaced from their homes and face an Israeli government which speaks of annexing the West Bank and expelling its Palestinian residents? She does not mention them in her column.
Sincerely,
Allan C. Brownfeld,
Editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.