ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
Photo by shoah.org.uk
Protesters gather outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends a conference on March 12, in Washington, DC. U.S. government officials refused to meet with him following his comments on wiping out the Palestinian village of Huwara. (CELAL GUNES/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES).
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2023, pp. 32-33
By Allan C. Brownfeld
AS ISRAEL’S FAR-RIGHT regime advances its agenda, the American Jewish community is in growing turmoil. More and more Jewish voices are expressing concern that having embraced Zionism was a mistake—one that 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; representatives of leading American Jewish organizations shunned him. 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 reported: “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, DC 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.’”
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,” according to the March 3 Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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: “The anti-government protests within Israel embody liberal Zionism, rather than liberation for all. Let’s dream bigger.”
Rabbi Rosen makes the case clear for his fellow Americans: “As a Jewish state, Israeli democracy can only truly extend to Jewish citizens. Unlike the U.S., 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.”
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.”
ACCEPTING A FALSE NARRATIVE
In the early years when Israeli state building was under way, the American Jewish establishment and religious leaders promoted 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 more 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 fading away.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, long a strong supporter of Israel, wrote a column in the Times on March 7 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 Binyamin 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.” In what Friedman calls “a paradigm shift,” he cites Gidi Grinstein, the founder of the Israeli think tank Reut, who wrote an article published a few weeks earlier 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.”
In November 2015, Commentary magazine held a symposium with this theme: “What will the condition of the Jewish community be 50 years from now?” One of most perceptive responses came from Rabbi Jacob Neusner, an academic scholar of Judaism who taught at Bard College. Rabbi Neusner makes clear that, “Israel’s flag is not mine. My homeland is America. “…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.
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.
