Israel at 60 Has an Increasingly Troubled Relationship With American Jews

By Allan C. Brownfeld

Israel’s 60th anniversary has revealed an American Jewish community increasingly divided with regard to its relationship to the state which proclaims itself the “Jewish homeland” and which persists in telling American Jews, according to the traditional Zionist formula, that they are living in “exile” and that their religious obligation is to make “aliyah”—i.e., emigrate to Israel.

Some American Jewish leaders accept this formula, such as Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. Earlier in its history, that organization rejected the notion of Jewish nationalism, declaring instead that Judaism was a religion of universal values, equally at home everyplace in the world.

In an editorial in the Spring 2008 issue of Reform Judaism magazine, Yoffie declared that, “We live at an extraordinary moment in the history of the Jewish people. After 2,000 years, we have once again established a sovereign Jewish nation in the Land of Israel—the one place in the world where Shabbat and the festivals provide the rhythm of the calendar and where Jews can apply Jewish values and the Jewish spirit to every aspect of life. We are blessed to do what Moses was not permitted to do: to set foot on the soil of the Jewish State. And not only can we walk on her soil; we can build on it. We can watch children grow up on it, speaking the language of the Bible...Israel needs us as never before. It requires our political activism, our financial support and our frequent visits...”

The reality, however, is that, both within Israel and among Jews in the U.S. and other countries, Israel’s 60th anniversary has led to much introspection about the dilemmas the country faces, both internally and in its relationship with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors.

In his article “Is Israel Finished?” in the May 2008 Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s national correspondent and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, points out that, “The internal threats to Israel’s existence are severe...Israel’s greatest military victory, in 1967, led to a squalid and seemingly endless occupation, and to the birth of a mystical, antidemocratic, and revanchist strain of Zionism, made manifest in the settlements of the West Bank. These settlements have undermined Israel’s international legitimacy and demoralized moderate Palestinians. The settlers exist far outside the Israeli political consensus, and their presence will likely help incite a third intifada. Yet the country seems unable to confront the settlements.”

The original secular socialist Zionism is no longer in vogue.

Ironically, as some American Jewish leaders call for American Jews to move to Israel, the real population movement we have seen is of Israelis moving to the United States and other countries. According to Goldberg, “44 percent of Israelis said they would be ready to leave their country if they could find a better standard of living abroad. There are already up to 40,000 Israelis in Silicon Valley (and more than half a million across the U.S.), and the emigration of Israel’s most talented citizens is a constant worry of Israeli leaders.”

Beyond this, wondered Goldberg: “Does the concentration of so many Jews in a claustrophobically small space in the world’s most volatile region, actually undermine the Jewish people’s ability to survive, an ability that was called into question more than 60 years ago when 33 percent of the world’s Jews were murdered. I do not think it is merely a symptom of Jewish hypochondria to ask such questions.”

The original secular socialist Zionism of the state’s founders, which appealed to the idealism of many American Jews, is no longer in vogue. The April 5, 2008 issue of The Economist reported that, “To today’s haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews]a Zionist state means one that upholds Jewish law; to the religious-Zionist settlers, one that returns the Jewish people to all of their biblical lands; to the secular left, a state that is democratic and liberal yet manages to maintain a Jewish majority...Jews outside Israel...are questioning all the traditional Zionist assumptions about what the country should mean to them. Israel as a gravitational center of the Jewish world? Not necessarily, say the Jews of America, who are about equally numerous. Israel as a hothouse of Jewish spiritual and cultural life? It is more diverse here, say Jews in America, where Orthodox rabbis lack the hegemony they have in Israel; growing faster here, say Jews in Russia, where the proselytizing Lubavitch movement has engineered a post-Soviet resurrection of Jewish life; more vibrant here, say Jews in western Europe, where these days lots of non-Jews are studying Hebrew, Yiddish, Torah and Jewish cultural history. Israel as a Jewish safe haven? You have to be joking, say Jews almost everywhere, eyeing the rest of the Middle East.”

Compensating Failings

As a result, the magazine reported, traditional forms of Jewish support for Israel are changing: “Some of the wealthy foreign Jews whose names adorn almost every Israeli university building, museum wing, hospital ward and public garden now wonder if this is the best use of their money. American Jews raised over $340 million in emergency aid during the 2006 Lebanon war, but Isaac Devash, an Israeli philanthropist and entrepreneur, argues that they need to stop compensating for the state’s failings and instead strengthen it by strengthening the society that upholds it.”

The connection between younger American Jews and Israel has been fraying for years. A recent study by sociologists Steven M. Cohen and Ari Kelman found a consistent increase in alienation in each younger generation. “Every measure indicates a decline of attachment to Israel from one generation to the next,” said Kelman, a sociologist at the University of California at Davis. According to the report, only 60 percent of American Jews under 35 believed that caring about Israel was an important part of being Jewish.

While the organized Jewish community believes that the unwillingness of most American Jews, particularly younger people, to consider Israel as somehow “central” to their religious identity represents a problem, other Jewish voices are concerned that Israel, the object of so much attention and support, is, in many ways, not being true to traditional Jewish values.

What Israel needs, argues Henry Siegman, director of U.S./Middle East Project in New York, and former executive director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America, is not blind support but “tough love.”

Writing in the May 5, 2008 issue of The Nation, Siegman urges that we recognize that, “for all the sins attributable to Palestinians—and they are legion, including inept and corrupt leadership, failed institution-building and the murderous violence of rejectionist groups—there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state primarily because Israel’s various governments, from 1967 until today, have never had the intention of allowing such a state to come into being. It would be one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state until certain security concerns had been dealt with. But no government serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued, without let-up, the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands, which even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.”

What is now required of the world’s statesmen, Siegman argues, “is not more peace conferences or clever adjustments to previous peace formulations but the moral and political courage to end their collaboration with the massive hoax the peace process has turned into. Of course, Palestinian violence must be condemned and stopped, particularly when it targets civilians. But is it not utterly disingenuous to pretend that Israel’s occupation—maintained by IDF-manned checkpoints and barricades, helicopter gunships, jet fighters, targeted assassinations and military incursions, not to speak of the massive theft of Palestinian lands—is not an exercise in continuous and unrelenting violence against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians? If Israel were to renounce violence, could the occupation last one day?...Short of addressing the problem by its right name...and taking effective collective action to end a colonial enterprise that disgraces what began as a noble Jewish national liberation struggle, further peace conferences, no matter how well intentioned, make their participants accessories to one of the longest and cruelest deceptions in the annals of international diplomacy.”

Redefining “Pro-Israel”

An indication of how alienated so many Jewish Americans are from the “Israel right or wrong” position advocated by groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) can be seen in the creation of a new political action and lobbying group, known as JStreet and JStreetPAC. “The definition of what it means to be pro-Israel has come to diverge from pursuing a peace settlement,” said Alan Solomont, a prominent Democratic Party fund-raiser involved in the initiative. In recent years, he said, “We have heard the voices of neocons, and right-of-center Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals, and the mainstream views of the American Jewish community have not been heard.”

The executive director of the new group is Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House. His own personal history shows the depth of his relationship with Israel. One hundred and twenty five years ago, his great-grandparents arrived in Jaffa from today’s Belarus. They helped establish Petah Tikva and his grandparents went on to be among the founders of Tel Aviv. A hard-line Zionist revisionist, his grandfather worked closely with Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin. Ben-Ami himself has lived in Jerusalem.

Writing in the April 25, 2008 issue of The Forward, Ben-Ami declared that, “With this as my heritage, I say confidently that what today passes for pro-Israel politics in the United States does not serve the best interests of the people or the countries my family has lived and died for. In this, I stand squarely with a substantial portion of Israelis and American Jews.”

Ben-Ami lamented that in the U.S., “being pro-Israel requires only mouthing scripted talking points about staunch support for Israel, the special American-Israeli relationship and the shared bond in the war on terror. For the sake of Israel, the United States and the world, it is time for American political discourse to re-engage with reality. Voices of reason need to reclaim what it means to be pro-Israel and to establish in American political discourse that Israel’s core security interest is to achieve a negotiated two-state solution and to define once and for all permanent, internationally recognized borders...It is time for the broad sensible mainstream of pro-Israel American Jews and their allies to challenge those on the extreme right who claim to speak for all American Jews in the national debate about Israel and the Middle East—and who, through the use of fear and intimidation, have cut off reasonable debate on the topic.”

In Ben-Ami’s view, “A new political movement is a necessity not just for Israel but for the heart and soul of the American Jewish community. By and large, we are a progressive community...Over the decades, we have been at the forefront of many civil rights, social justice and other causes...But in recent years we have drifted. In the name of protecting Israel, some of our community’s leaders became linked with neoconservatives who brought us the war in Iraq and now seek to extend that rousing success to Iran—even as the majority of American Jews opposed the war in Iraq and military action in Iran...What will it say for us as a people if at a rare moment in our communal history when we have achieved success, acceptance and power, we fail to act according to the values and ideals passed down to us over thousands of years when we were the outcasts, the minority and the powerless?”

Whatever else Israel’s 60th birthday means for American Jews, the fact that there are increasing divisions with regard to that anniversary—and to the relationship of American Jews to what many view as a state which has turned its back on traditional Jewish values—is clear. There can be little doubt that a serious reappraisal of Israel’s role in American Jewish life is now under way.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.