ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
Israeli and American citizens call for U.S. intervention during a rally against the government’s controversial justice reform bill, outside the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv on March 7, 2023. (JACK GUEZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2023, pp. 21-23
Israel and Judaism
By Allan C. Brownfeld
SINCE BINYAMIN Netanyahu’s victory in Israel’s November election and the ascension to power of his far-right government, including openly racist ministers whose contempt for democracy is on constant display, even the strongest Jewish supporters of Israel in the U.S. are doing their best to separate themselves from what they call that country’s “retreat from democracy.”
Among those who have issued strong statements critical of Netanyahu and his far-right colleagues are long-time Anti-Defamation League leader Abraham Foxman, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Bret Stephens, Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) and a host of others. The Washington Post published an article in February with the headline, “Some U.S. Rabbis Forgo Prayer for Israel to Protest Far-right Government.” The Post reported that “Many American Jews are outraged by Israel’s new government and its anti-democratic leaning, which run contrary to their liberal Jewish values. In [February], at least three petitions with hundreds of signatures have emerged, each criticizing the new government and what many see as its potentially authoritarian bent.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, chief executive of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, noted: “Even rabbis who don’t usually take risks to speak about Israel, occupation and democracy, are taking a few more risks.” Rabbi Sharon Brous, in a sermon on Feb. 4 to the liberal IKAR Community in Los Angeles, said, “This moment of extremism has been a long time in the making and our silence has made us complicit.” She castigated Jewish leaders and communities who have been reluctant to criticize Israel.
In fact, Israel has never been the Western-style democracy it claimed to be and which its American Jewish supporters believed it to be. This fact was well understood by Israelis. In an important article published in Haaretz on Feb. 6, 2023 with the title, “Over Decades, Democracy for Israelis Has Been a Military Junta for Palestinians,” correspondent Amira Hass, who lives in the occupied West Bank, assesses the harsh realities which have always faced Palestinians, both within Israel and in the occupied territories. Hass observes: “The present government is dangerous to many Jews…but first and foremost it is dangerous for all Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line. It could carry out various expulsion plans, which its senior ministers—Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir—have been advancing openly.”
The idea that Israel was a genuine democracy in the past is one that Hass shows to be false: “After all, long before justice ministers acted to weaken the judiciary—which never stopped the dispossession and discrimination—expelling Palestinians from their homeland was burnt into Israeli ideology and praxis as a realistic option. Even before the state was founded, it viewed the indigenous people as an unnecessary surplus who in the best case are to be ignored and in the worst case to be gotten rid of.”
The danger of the expulsion of Palestinians is real, in Hass’s view, “because most of the protesters against the government are convinced that, until now, Israel was a democracy. They have been and still are willfully blind to the fact that their democracy for Jews has been a military junta for Palestinians. The dictatorship they are warning about has been operating already for…decades… Israel’s military regime over the Palestinians is a parliament, government, courts, jailer and hangman all together…We control a conquered population, deprive it of civil rights and…claimed everything was legal and proper…The worsening harm planned against the Palestinians has a Knesset majority larger than the size of the (Netanyahu) coalition…discrimination against the Palestinians is part of the consensus.”
JEWISH AMERICANS’ EMBRACE OF ISRAEL
It is instructive to review the history of the organized American Jewish community’s total embrace of Israel and its obsession with defending whatever Israel has done. After the 1967 war, the American Jewish community turned its attention to Holocaust remembrance and the promotion of Israeli interests. The theologian Marc Ellis posited the birth of “Holocaust theology in which a Judaism emerges that fuses its religious and cultural heritage with loyalty to the state of Israel.” The rabbi and philosopher Emil Fackenheim, in his book To Mend the World, defined the defense of Israel as the “orienting reality for all Jewish and indeed all post-Holocaust thought.”
There were dissenters, of course. Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, a former assistant to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and later a friend and mentor to a young Barack Obama, wrote a 1979 essay, “Overemphasizing the Holocaust.” In it, Wolf lamented the fact that in “Jewish school or synagogue …one does not learn about God or the Midrash…nearly as carefully as one learns about the Holocaust.” Worse, American Jewish leaders were using “the Shoah as the model for Jewish destiny, and so ‘Never again’ had come to mean ‘Jews first—and the devil take the hindmost.’” Historian Peter Novick argued that “as the Middle Eastern dispute came to be viewed within a Holocaust paradigm,” it simultaneously became “endowed with all the black-and-white simplicity of the Holocaust”—a framework that promoted “a belligerent stance toward any criticism of Israel.”
In 1972, a group of prominent liberal rabbis and intellectuals came together in a group called Breira (Choice). The group called on Israel “to make territorial concessions” and “recognize the legitimacy of the national aspirations of the Palestinians” so as to reach a peace agreement that reflected “the idealism and thought of many early Zionists with whom we identify.”
Breira’s founding chairman was Rabbi Arnold Wolf. In March 1973 he wrote in the Jewish journal Sh’ma: “Israel colonizes the ‘administered’ territories without regard to international law or the rights of the indigenous Palestinians…Israel may be the Jewish state; it is not now and perhaps can never be Zion.”
Breira came under immediate and bitter attack from the Jewish establishment. Reform leader Arthur Lelyveld accused Breira of giving “aid and comfort…to those who would cut aid to Israel and leave it defenseless before murderers and terrorists.” Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Simcha Dinitz, made it clear that all differences between Israel and American Jews should be aired privately. Commentary launched an attack calling Breira “a vivid demonstration of the inroads made into the American Jewish consciousness by the campaign to delegitimize Israel.”
Breira was not able to survive. It fell apart by the winter of 1977-78. Rabbi Max Ticktin would observe in retrospect, “We were naive about the power of the Jewish establishment and that came out painfully when they began to attack us and limit our activity.”
ZIONISTS ARE SPEAKING OUT
Netanyahu has made it clear that Israel is not the liberal democracy Jewish Americans thought it was. Self-proclaimed Zionists are speaking out. An article in The Washington Post carried the headline, “We are Liberal American Zionists. We Stand with Israel’s Protesters.” The authors are three prominent Zionists: Paul Berman, critic-at-large at Tablet and on the editorial board of Dissent; Martin Peretz, former publisher of The New Republic; and Leon Wieseltier, formerly literary editor of The New Republic.
They write: “It is not just a matter of the proposed law restricting the power of the Supreme Court, the only check and balance in Israel’s system—a law that Netanyahu has proposed apparently for the corrupt purpose of rescuing himself from his own legal morass. A number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and theocrats have taken powerful ministerial posts in his government, and the whole spirit of their enterprise is visibly hostile toward the culture of democratic tolerance and rationality.”
When it comes to Palestinians, the authors noted: “The new government threatens Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, who will face an ever more aggressive campaign to establish still more Jewish settlements. It threatens Palestinian citizens of Israel proper, who will face increasing challenges to their legitimate status in Israeli society…Israel…needs and deserves maximum political support for the Israeli protesters in the streets…”
“Why the Pro-Settler Right Hates Israel’s Justice System So Much,” published in The Washington Jewish Week, was written by Susie Gelman, board chair of Israel Policy Forum, a group founded in 1993 that supports a two-state solution. She writes: “Israel’s democratic decay cannot be discussed without mentioning the Palestinian conflict. The Supreme Court is a critical pillar of Israeli democracy, but it is not the only one. Why, then, have would-be authoritarians and theocrats in the coalition taken aim at it first?…The obvious answer is that the court…is widely viewed on the Israeli right as an impediment to Jewish settlement in the West Bank and to an expansive vision of Greater Israel….In 1979, the court issued an important verdict barring the establishment of settlements on private land in the occupied territories.”
Then, Gelman points out, “There was the ‘judicial revolution’ of the 1990s, in which the court…developed an approach more closely resembling judicial review in the United States and other countries—namely, the ability to strike down unconstitutional laws (or, in Israel’s case, the legislation that violated the quasi-constitutional Basic Laws). As the court’s reach grew, so did the fears of religious Zionists and settlers that it would stand in the way of their goals…The new government is not leaving much open to interpretation here. Alongside its intentions for the court, the coalition also entered into office following announcements of bold plans for legalizing hitherto unauthorized West Bank settlements.”
In an important article, “The Agony of Liberal Zionism” published by the International Press Agency, Pressenza, Yakov Rabkin, professor emeritus of history at the University of Montreal assesses the growing crisis within Zionism. The author of the book What Is Modern Israel? writes: “The new government may destroy the last of the two illusions dear to liberal Zionists and instrumental in maintaining Western support for Israel. Over half a million settlers on the territories Israel conquered in 1967 killed the prospect of a two-state solution. It has been confirmed dead and buried, even though Western governments continue to pay it lip service. The current Israeli government is casting a death blow to the second one, that of a ‘Jewish and democratic state.’ These two illusions have long been hiding the reality of Zionist supremacy over the Palestinians. Unlike the Tel Aviv protesters who decry the dangers to democracy, Palestinians have long known that Israel’s democracy is, in fact, an ethnocracy to oppress them.”
In Rabkin’s view, “Ethnic supremacy is basic to the Zionist project. It was enshrined legislatively in 2018 when the Knesset adopted a basic law proclaiming that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, rather than a state belonging to the people who inhabit it. This law offers legal protection to the well-established practice of discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel…Respectable human rights organizations in Israel and elsewhere have concluded that Israel practices a form of apartheid.”
Zionism, Rabkin argues, is “a variety of European ethnic nationalism.” The extreme right-wing now in power, he declares, “reflects constitutive values of Zionism and is not shy to assert them…The current government undercuts the illusion of liberal Zionism, a political oxymoron.”
Writing in The New York Times, Peter Beinart, Professor at City University of New York and an editor of Jewish Currents—and a former Zionist—headlines his article, “You Can’t Save Democracy in a Jewish State.” He notes that demonstrations in Israel against Netanyahu’s proposed judicial and other “reforms” include very few Palestinians. The reason, he suggests, is that “It’s not a movement for equal rights. It’s a movement to preserve the political system that existed before Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition took power and was not, for Palestinians, a genuine liberal democracy in the first place. It’s a movement to save liberal democracy for Jews.”
The terms that are used when it comes to discussing Israel as a “democracy” are confusing. Beinart provides this assessment: “Democracy means government by the people. Jewish statehood means government by Jews…Jews comprise only half the people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea…For most Palestinians under Israeli control—those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—Israel is not a democracy. It’s not a democracy because Palestinians in the occupied territories can’t vote for the government which dominates their lives…In 2018, the Knesset passed legislation reaffirming Israel’s identity as ‘the nation-state of the Jewish people,’ which means that the country belongs to Jews like me who don’t live there, but not to the Palestinians, who live under its control, even the lucky few who hold Israeli citizenship. All this happened before Mr. Netanyahu’s new government took power. This is the vibrant liberal democracy that liberal Zionists want to save…Ultimately, a movement premised on ethnocracy cannot successfully defend the rule of law. Only a movement for equality can.”
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.
