brownfeld_15-17r.qxp_Israel and Judaism 2/2/22 5:11 PM Page 15
Israel and Judaism
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Unraveling of American Zionism Sharply Divides Jewish Americans By Allan C. Brownfeld
Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu (c) visits a house in the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip on May 28, 2008. U.N. human rights observers led by Tutu met survivors of a 2006 Israeli bombing that killed 19 Palestinian civilians, including five women and eight children, in their homes, leading the South African cleric to say the group was “devastated” by what they learned. WIDESPREAD ATTENTION is being focused on the decline of Zionism within the American Jewish community. An article in The New York Times Magazine (Nov. 7, 2021) by Marc Tracy, appropriately entitled, “Inside the Unraveling of American Zionism,” has stimulated much discussion. This came shortly after the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem used the term “apartheid” to characterize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as did Human Rights Watch. Increasingly, the term “apartheid” is being used to identify Israeli policy. The death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African advocate of non-violence and racial justice, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, focused attention upon his characterization of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. In a speech in Boston on April 13, 2002, (see June/July 2002 Washington Report, pages 56-58), he declared: “In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disen-
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. MARCH/APRIL 2022
franchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust center in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.” What Tutu found “not so understandable, not justified” was what Israel “did to another people to guarantee its existence. I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about…I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis… My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history, so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?” Today, many prominent Israelis agree with Archbishop Tutu’s assessment. In December, Amos Schocken, the third generation of his
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