Israel’s Far-Right Government Alienates Even American Zionists

ISRAEL’S FAR-RIGHT GOVERNMENT

has made its goals clear. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declared on Dec. 30, 2022: “These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel—in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

The government includes far-right parties that oppose LGBTQ rights, equality for women, and religious rights for non-Orthodox Jews and support annexation of the occupied territories and expulsion of most of its Palestinian residents. It plans to control the Supreme Court so that blatantly racist legislation will not be overruled.

Establishment American Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations say they are taking a “wait and see” attitude about the new government, which they argue is a product of Israel’s “democratic” system. Many other American Jews are taking a far different position.

In December, more than 330 American rabbis, including some who occupy prominent roles in major cities, pledged to block members of the Religious Zionist bloc in the Israeli government from speaking in their synagogues and will lobby to keep them from speaking in their communities. The signatories come from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. There are no Orthodox signatories. The letter was organized by David Teutsch, a leading Reconstructionist rabbi in Philadelphia, and John Rosove, the rabbi emeritus of Temple Israel in Los Angeles.

The letter outlines five Religious Zionist proposals that it says will cause irreparable harm to the relations between Israel and Jewish Americans. These include changing the Law of Return to keep out non-Orthodox converts and their descendants; eroding LGBTQ rights; allowing the Knesset to overrule decisions of the Supreme

Court; annexing the West Bank; and expelling Arab citizens who oppose Israel’s government.

Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed in Manhattan will no longer recite the prayer for the state of Israel that many synagogues feature at worship services. He says he can no longer pray for the success of Israel’s leaders, ministers and advisers since it includes right-wing extremists he considers “akin to the Ku Klux Klan.” “I don’t hope that this government succeeds. I hope that this government falls and is replaced by something better. I just could not imagine us saying this prayer that their efforts be successful. I think their efforts are dastardly.”

Abraham Foxman, 82, the past leader of the Anti-Defamation League, who has said that “nothing could separate him from support for Israel,” now says, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “The leaders of an extreme party could do the trick if they get their way…I never thought I would reach that point where I would say that my support for Israel is conditional.” In an interview with The Forward, he said: “I’ve always said my support for Israel is unconditional. I don’t think it’s a horrific condition to say, ‘I love Israel as a Jewish and democratic state that respects pluralism. If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.’”

Foxman

appears to be oblivious to Israel’s history of opposition to democracy for non-Jewish citizens and its resistance to pluralism.

Foxman said his outlook reflected that of the larger American Jewish community. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, retired from the ADL in 2015, fifty years after first joining the organization. He laments Israel’s move to the far right: “It’s not one thing, it’s a whole package of things, which is bringing us back to the Middle Ages. It’s undermining democracy in terms of the legal system, it’s cutting back on human or equal rights for all, whether it’s LGBTQ, the Conservative movement or the Reform movement.”

Jodi Rudoren, editor of The Forward, wrote: “Itamar Ben-Gvir’s senseless, audacious pilgrimage…to the Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock compound… certainly is a harbinger (of what will happen). I am deeply worried about the independence of Israel’s judiciary, about the new government’s threats to LGBTQ people and plans to redefine who is considered Jewish under Israeli law and, of course, about the ongoing, escalating violence against Palestinians.”

A growing number of American Jews are now saying that critics of Zionism were correct from the beginning. Consider the case of Hillel Halkin, an author and translator who moved to Israel from the United States in 1970. He is the author of Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic, which won a National Jewish Book Award in 1978. In the book, he urges American Jews to emigrate to Israel. Halkin, now 83, admits that he was wrong. Writing in The Jewish Review of Books, he declares that critics of Zionism were correct: “We’re over the cliff and falling…nothing will save it (Israel) from the abyss of messianic right-wing politics.” Israel, he laments, avoided the central issue of Palestinian rights. To an anti-Zionist friend, with whom he argued over the years, he wrote: “You’ve won the argument. For years now, Israel has seemed to me like a man sleepwalking toward a cliff. Now we’ve fallen from it.” Sadly, he notes, racism has come to dominate Israeli politics and, as a result, “Israel is headed for disaster.”

Tom Ginsburg, professor of international law at the University of Chicago, was inter- viewed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and provided this assessment of the Netanyahu government’s plan for the Israeli legal system: “You could have a situation where the Knesset—which currently has a role in protecting human rights—can pick out and override specific cases, which goes against the idea of the rule of law.” He noted that similar changes have occurred in Hungary and Poland, “which are not necessarily countries you want to compare yourself to…I honestly worry about whether this society will remain a Jewish and democratic one with the current coalition…The ethnonationalist direction of the country bothers me as a Jew.”

It’s puzzling how someone who understands international law wasn’t troubled by Israel until this last election.

Even Alan Dershowitz, long a staunch defender of Israel’s policies, including its indefensible human rights record, said he cannot defend sweeping judicial changes including allowing lawmakers to overrule the Supreme Court. Dershowitz said the proposed changes pose a threat to civil liberties and minority rights in Israel. “If I were in Israel, I would be joining the protests,” Dershowitz told Israeli Army Radio, referring to anti-government protests in Tel Aviv on Jan. 7 that drew thousands. “It will make it much more difficult for people like me who try to defend Israel in the international court of public opinion to defend them effectively. It would be a tragedy to see the Supreme Court weakened.”

A number of American Jewish groups spoke out against including the extremist faction in the government while Netanyahu was negotiating with the bloc, and more have done so since he announced the government’s formation. They include the major non-Orthodox religious movements and the liberal Jewish Middle East policy groups, including Partners for Progressive Israel, the Israel Policy Forum, J Street, IfNotNow and Americans for Peace Now.

Few Americans understand the extreme and racist nature of Religious Zionism, which now plays an important role in Israel’s government. These Jewish fundamentalists show total contempt for non-Jews.

Rabbi Kook the Elder, the revered father of the messianic tendency in Religious Zion- ism, said: “The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”

Rabbi Kook’s entire teaching, which is followed devoutly by those who lead the settler movement on the West Bank (among others), is based upon the Lurianic Kabbalah, the school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late 16th to the early 19th century. One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Kabbalah is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Kabbalah, the world was created solely for the sake of the Jews; the existence of nonJews was subsidiary.

Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, an Americanborn activist rabbi on the West Bank, speaks freely of Jews’ spiritual superiority over non-Jews, which he believes is based on genetics: “If you saw two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first…Something is special about Jewish DNA…If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.”

Assessing the essential racism of Religious Zionism in the book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Norton Mezvinsky, who was professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, and Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and longtime Hebrew University professor, provide this assessment of Rabbi Ginsburgh’s position: “Changing the words ‘Jewish’ to ‘German’ or ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Jewish’ to ‘Jewish’ turns the Ginsburgh position into the doctrine that made Auschwitz possible in the past…The similarities between the Jewish messianic trend and German Nazism are glaring.…The hatred of Western culture with its democratic elements is common to both movements.”

Zionism was a minority movement among Jews until the advent of Nazism and the Holocaust. Reform Judaism rejected Zionism until the 1940s. With the creation of Israel in 1948, Zionism slowly came to dominate organized Jewish life in the United States, even though most Jewish

Americans always rejected the Zionist idea that they were in “exile” and that Israel was their real “homeland.”

Slowly, American Judaism transformed itself from a religion of universal values which worshiped a God who had created men and women of every race and nation, to an Israel-centered religion in which the state of Israel often appeared to be the object of worship, much like the golden calf in the Bible. Israeli flags appeared in synagogues and promoting Israel became a major goal of Jewish organizations. Some critics pointed this out, but they were silenced or ignored. Some observers fear that Judaism is losing all spiritual content.

In 1988, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who had headed the American Jewish Congress, wrote in the New York Review of Books: “American Jews preferred to see Israel as it was depicted to be [by] Leon Uris in Exodus, in which Israelis were painted as totally noble and Arabs were the Middle Eastern equivalent of the murderous Indians of Hollywood westerns. When support for Israel became the ‘secular religion’ of most American Jews, Israel had to be presented as a homeland that was superior to all other homelands. Most American Jews have not wanted to know what was really happening in Israel. Now they found themselves face to face with the uncomfortable fact that there is a right-wing in Israel that is so insistent on its ideology that it would rather live amid violence than search for compromises.”

Netanyahu makes it clear that Israel is not the liberal democracy Jewish Americans thought it was. Even before his new government was elected, younger American Jews were growing increasingly alienated from the ethnocentrism which had replaced universalism in Jewish life. One observer of these trends is Eric Alterman, for many years a media columnist for The Nation and now a professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College (CUNY).

Speaking at Tel Aviv University in May, Alterman declared that Israel had lost American liberals and that Judaism itself is in crisis because its only content is “pro-Israelism.” Alterman said, “Israel has lost the left, no question about it, and it can’t get it back as long as it has the occupation…It’s building 4,000 new settlements. It’s doing terrible things each day…Israel has lost American Jews and liberals because it has no content to offer besides stale ‘everyone hates the Jews’ propaganda that is meaningless to young Jews.”

Alterman elaborated: “Israel has a hasbara program…but they have nothing to reach out with anymore. Because the argument I was given that made sense to me when I was growing up and maybe made sense to my daughter; that there was the Holocaust and Jews have never been safe and Israelis were invaded and are at risk every minute—that argument doesn’t hold water any more. American Jews are still being given the exact same argument by Jewish organizations… but they’ve learned something very different in the news… What they see they don’t like...American Jewish youth are walking away from Judaism. They’re either turning away from Israel or they’re walking away from Judaism entirely. Because Judaism has no answers for them.”

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Alterman has just written a book, We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (available from Middle East Books and More) about the chasm between American and Israeli Jews. He argues that to save Judaism, the money spent on programs like Birthright Israel, to send young American Jews on free trips to Israel, should be spent instead “on the wonders of Jewish history and culture, so as to rejuvenate American Jewish institutions and social justice institutions…I feel like Israel has said to American Jews, ‘We’re going on our way, and you can take it or leave it.’ And more and more American Jews are going to leave…Because the occupation is forever… Liberals don’t like the idea of a ‘Jewish state.’ What is the reason that people living next to each other have different rights? Israel answers, ‘Arabs are going to destroy us. Shut up and sign the check.’ The American liberal response is to walk away.”

Before the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, Zionism was a minority view in the American Jewish community. Recent developments indicate that it is on its way to becoming a minority view once again. This will be a positive development for Judaism as a religion of universal values, and for Jewish critics of Zionism, such as the 80-year-old American Council for Judaism, which have kept alive an older humane Jewish moral and ethical tradition which now has an opportunity to emerge once again. A diminished role for Zionism in U.S. policy and public life will be especially beneficial for the integrity of U.S. foreign policy, and for the human rights of the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination. ■

United Nations Report