[Salon] Allan C. Brownfeld's letter to the editor of the Washington Post, published April 12, 2024

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

The loneliness of Israel, and the uncertain future of the region

Thousands of protesters call for the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip in Tel Aviv on April 6. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post). (Heidi Levine/FTWP)

In Ruth Marcus’s April 5 op-ed, “The unbearable loneliness of Israel,” which drew on reporting on a trip with her synagogue to Israel, she quoted an Israel Defense Forces 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 deaths of many thousands of civilians, including large numbers of women and children. This has been achieved in part by military aid paid for by U.S. taxpayers, counterbalanced by President Biden’s expressions of concern about the slaughter of civilians.

While Ms. Marcus did ask whether the current conflict is “the bitter fruit of years of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians and mistaken policies in the disputed territories,” she did not make space in this op-ed to discuss the history of Palestine, including the terrorism inflicted on Palestinians by the early Zionists in incidents such as the Deir Yassin massacre, which caused more than 750,000 people to flee their homes.

In the eyes of more and more Jewish Americans, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is a clear violation of Jewish moral and ethical values — and of the larger democratic values that are meant to tie our nations together. As Harvard University professor Noah Feldman argued in his book “To Be a Jew Today,” “many progressive American Jews find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no realistic prospect of liberal rights.”

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. And venerating Israel as the ultimate home for Jews and Judaism ignores the vibrancy and strength of Jewish life around the world. Jewish Americans are not, as Zionism proclaims, “in exile,” but are, and always have been, very much at home.

Israel’s “existential loneliness” must be discussed alongside the sense of isolation and despair felt by millions of Palestinians who have been displaced from their homes and face an Israeli government that speaks of annexing the West Bank and expelling its Palestinian residents.

Allan C. Brownfeld, Alexandria

The writer is editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.