Ilia Yefimovich/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
A protester waves a Palestinian flag during a demonstration against the new Israeli government, in Tel Aviv, January 14, 2023.
“The current Israeli government is really pushing away the majority of Jews in North America and the diaspora,” says Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, which represents the two million Reform Jews in the United States and Canada.
That estrangement is nothing new, but Bibi Netanyahu’s new coalition government is pushing as hard as it can to exacerbate it. Over the past few decades, Israeli policies toward West Bank Palestinians have rankled liberal American Jews, and decisively alienated many thousands of millennial and Gen Z Jews from Israel altogether. Now, by placing West Bank policing under the control of longtime supporters of anti-Palestinian terrorists and pro–West Bank annexationists, Netanyahu has all but ensured that the suppression of Palestinian rights and the constriction of Palestinians’ lives will grow radically more severe, and the estrangement of the liberal diaspora more profound as well. Netanyahu’s concomitant assault on Israel’s internal democratic norms, most particularly the independence and power of its judiciary, is a further provocation.
The estrangement is denominational as well. The new Netanyahu government has empowered not only the Jews-over-Palestinians crowd, but also the Orthodox-Jews-over-Reform-and-Conservative fanatics. This latter group, which is strongly represented in the new Netanyahu government, wants to restrict immigration to Israel to Jews who can pass through the Orthodox needle. Specifically, if a convert to Judaism (which describes many partners in what began as interreligious couples) moves to Israel and seeks citizenship, the convert must have converted under the rules of Orthodox Judaism and the supervision of an Orthodox rabbi. As nearly 90 percent of American Jews are either secular, Conservative, or Reform, this barrier to citizenship would keep out many of the non-Orthodox, and would also move Israel in a direction that is not only more theocratic, but also more generally right-wing and pre-Enlightenment.
Not surprisingly, American leaders in both the Reform and Conservative movements have howled at this proposal. “The majority of American Jews today look at the government’s West Bank policies, its war on the judiciary, and the very clear hatred of non-Orthodox Jews with horror,” Jacobs says. “Until now, no Israeli government ever spoke of reopening the terms of the Law of Return,” which since Israel’s founding has guaranteed Jews—including those converted by non-Orthodox denominations—the right to move to Israel and become citizens, offering a safe refuge from persecution that Jews lacked at the height of the Holocaust. With significant numbers of overwhelmingly secular Jews now fleeing from Russia, and some from Ukraine as well, Jacobs asks, “how has this suddenly become a time to restrict immigration?”
The Law of Return isn’t all that’s up for religious revision. The ultra-Orthodox now vested with state power also want to revoke the state’s acceptance of LGBTQ rights and lifestyles (though mayors of Israel’s more liberal and secular cities have told the new education minister that they’ll ignore his anti-LGBTQ strictures on public school curricula).
These myriad provocations have yet to manifest themselves in pressure from major Jewish groups on the U.S. government to change its unconditional support for the Israeli state, with one notable exception. J Street, the Jewish group that most clearly reflects the political perspectives of most American Jews (roughly 70 percent of whom vote Democratic and a clear majority of whom support a two-state solution and liberal democratic ideals), has consistently called for shifts in U.S. policy regarding Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Israeli policies toward West Bank Palestinians have rankled liberal American Jews, and alienated many thousands of millennial and Gen Z Jews from Israel altogether.
In several particulars, says J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami, the U.S. government “should treat Israel like any other country.” In the U.N. Security Council and other bodies, he says, “we give Israel carte blanche when it violates international law. Israel should be subject to consequences just as other nations are.” As to the financial aid that the U.S. provides Israel annually, he continues, “that money is provided to enhance security, not to undercut it. Our government should be doing oversight to see how that money is spent. Is it going to Israel to further its occupation policies in the West Bank? To help demolish Palestinian villages? That doesn’t enhance American security.”
The Biden administration, however, has responded to the Netanyahu government’s threats to Palestinians and its own judiciary with resounding silence. (To be sure, no one is suggesting that the Biden administration should involve itself in the Law of Return controversy over who is a Jew.) “Biden likes to work behind closed doors,” Ben-Ami says, “but this is a time not to be quiet but to go public” about the new Israeli government’s embrace of an aggressive and exclusionary Jewish nationalism, and its movement away from liberal democratic norms.
FOR NOW, HOWEVER, J STREET IS JOINED by just a handful of smaller liberal Zionist organizations, such as Americans for Peace Now, in demanding a public condemnation of the bigotry already spewing forth from Bibi’s various ministries. Indeed, public condemnation from the more “establishment” Jewish organizations is much harder to find today than it was just three years ago, when the emergence into mainstream Israeli politics of supporters of anti-Palestinian terrorism drew condemnations from the Jewish Federations of major U.S. cities and even AIPAC. Today, as Netanyahu has handed the Palestinian portfolio to those very same hate-mongers, the Jewish Federations and the rest of the “establishment” have been conspicuously silent.
For its part, AIPAC has enthusiastically welcomed Bibi’s new order. Then again, considering that AIPAC endorsed for re-election in 2022 more than 100 Republican members of Congress who’d voted on January 6, 2021, to overturn the Electoral College results, there’s little reason to expect AIPAC to be troubled by Israel’s retreat from liberal democracy. By its embrace not just of Bibi but Trump as well, AIPAC has severed its link to the majority of American Jews. But then, as is becoming increasingly clear, being a Jew in the diaspora comes with a set of beliefs that are not necessarily those of Jews in Israel (or in AIPAC).
As a refuge for diaspora Jews searching for a better life or literally fleeing for their lives and unable to go elsewhere, Israel has been indispensable. As a home of a nationalism that can be exclusionary and toxic, it’s been less so. The defining feature of Jews in the diaspora is that they’re always, definitionally, a minority. More often than not, therefore, they are champions of a doctrine of minority rights that often, for reasons both strategic and moral, becomes a doctrine of universal rights. For most diaspora Jews in the post-shtetl world, these beliefs are bred in the bone. This is not true of all diaspora Jews, of course, and certainly not for ultra-Orthodox theocrats for whom the doctrine of universal rights is alien to their worldview, as it is for theocrats of all faiths.
But not being in a permanent minority always has the potential of enabling a people to become an abusive majority, or a majority less concerned with minority and universal rights. That’s not a condition that’s peculiar to Jews; it’s a condition that’s peculiar to people. What is peculiar to Jews is their millennia in the diaspora as self-conscious minorities, reminded even by ancient texts that as onetime strangers in the land of Egypt, they are obliged to welcome all strangers. That’s not a reminder that is necessarily forgotten once they’ve settled into a land where they’re not a minority, but it is one that’s easier to forget. Many Israelis have not forgotten it, but many have.
When I think of the distinctive beliefs of diaspora Jews, two elections, both in California, come to mind. In 1986, Californians voted in retention elections for three of the state’s Supreme Court justices, all of them liberals appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown some years earlier. The election came at a time when concern about crime and support for death penalties (which the Brown-appointed chief justice had consistently struck down when they came before the Court) were running very high. The justices went down in a heap, as I’m still painfully aware, since I managed a campaign on their behalf—one among many reasons for my midlife career shift from political consultant to journalist.
Exit polls showed that only two demographic groups had supported the justices, and they did so overwhelmingly: Jews and Blacks. There were a multitude of factors behind that vote, but one was that America’s two most self-conscious minorities understood that the Court was the one branch of government likeliest to defend minority rights. This was before the Republican Party, in both the legislative and judicial branches, had fully opted to treat America’s white Christians as an embattled minority—often at the expense of actual minorities—even as they were, and are still, in the majority.
The second classic instance of diaspora Jewish voting came in 1994, when Proposition 187 was put before voters. The measure proposed to deny all public services, including the right to attend K-12 public schools, to undocumented immigrants, who at the time were coming in great numbers from Mexico and Central America to Southern California. In their last great burst of nativism, California voters approved the measure (most of which was almost immediately struck down by the courts).
Looking at a precinct-level analysis of the vote in Los Angeles County while the then political editor of the LA Weekly, it became clear to me that the measure had lost (heavily) only in Latino and Jewish neighborhoods. That Jewish vote was a clear expression of Jews’ awareness of their own necessarily migratory history and, expanding the particular to the universal, how other groups could be compelled to undertake odysseys of their own. (To be sure, it also reflected a class position that wouldn’t be in any way threatened by an influx of immigrants from poorer nations.)
No two Jewish votes could be further removed in spirit from the beliefs animating Israel’s new government, which has gone to war against both its judiciary and the Palestinians under its rule. At various times, Israel’s high court has struck down past governments’ most egregious anti-Palestinian policies, though the current kerfuffle is fundamentally about the judiciary’s right to sit in judgment on—and if the facts warrant it, convict—Netanyahu, who currently faces three separate trials involving bribes and other instances of corruption. To a lesser degree, it’s also about the court’s current enforcement of a law that forbids convicted felons from serving as Cabinet members, which the head of the largest party in Bibi’s coalition, other than Bibi’s own Likud, was doing.
As for the Palestinians, the policy of the new government is to move to an even more oppressive rule over the West Bank and Palestinian East Jerusalem, or perhaps even a formal incorporation of those regions into Israel itself, while denying citizenship and the right to vote to the Palestinians who live there. As recent massive demonstrations in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities make clear, there are plenty of Jewish Israelis who oppose such policies, though even when the right has been out of power, Israeli policy toward Palestinians has still been oppressive. The demonstrators made clear they were particularly troubled by the assault on the courts and the imposition of the ultra-Orthodox beliefs (as on LGBTQ rights) on the whole of Israeli society. In this sense, Israeli Jews have been louder than American Jewish organization or Jewish members of Congress about Israel’s rapid movement away from liberal ideals.
Absent what should be a chorus of Jewish voices, the Biden administration will remain publicly silent as well, to the detriment of Israelis, Palestinians, the Middle East, and America’s own credibility. At the risk of invoking a stereotype, we Jews are not famed for our silences. It’s time to speak up, and as a sage of yore once remarked, “If not now, when?”
