Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seen during a previous visit to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, March 6, 2018.
Buried beneath the deluge of stories, first, on whether Joe Biden was in or out, and now on the implications of his withdrawal, there’s another imminent big deal that has largely fallen through journalism’s cracks and eluded public notice: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress, coming up this Wednesday. With so much at stake in our own upcoming election, the kind of outrage and dismay that Bibi’s visit would otherwise occasion has understandably been lost in the shuffle of Democratic dread.
Given this existential distraction, it may be that such protesters as do turn out to demonstrate against our Congress’s convening—at Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s behest—to applaud the man still bent on reducing every last structure in Gaza to ruins, will represent the outermost extremes of Palestinian ultranationalism, those who actually celebrate Hamas’s murder raid of October 7. That would be a tragedy, not just damaging even further the cause of Palestinian nationalism but also weakening whatever faint hopes remain for the only possible remedy to the ongoing tragedy of Israel-Palestine: a two-state solution.
Those members of Congress applauding Bibi will disproportionately be Republicans, not least because Bibi has long made his preference for Trump-ized Republicans unmistakably clear. But even putting aside these domestic political provocations, there are legions of congressional Democrats who believe Bibi’s tenure in office, and now his unending war, have been a disaster for Israel, Palestine, and the entire Middle East, not to mention our own nation’s long-standing support, formally at least, for a two-state solution. Those Democrats—and their ranks extend well beyond the Squad—need to formulate some kind of demonstration of their own. So do the majority of American Jews who oppose Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza, and its government’s increasing obeisance to the dark-age beliefs and practices of the ultra-Orthodox, which despite the opposition of the vast majority of Israeli Jews, Bibi’s government is codifying into law.
But what to do, on such short notice? (Well, the notice hasn’t been short, but the ability to focus on an action amid everything that’s going on in American politics certainly has been.) On Friday, my colleague Bob Kuttner called on President Biden to use the occasion of Wednesday’s speech to break with Bibi, who’s thwarted every one of Biden’s efforts to provide food, water, and medicine to beleaguered Gaza Palestinians, to curtail Israel’s Carthaginian destruction of Gaza, and to stop the current large-scale seizures of Palestinian property in the West Bank. Bob suggested ending U.S. offensive military support for Israel; that would be a long-overdue start.
Some kind of visible repudiation of Bibi’s politics and Bibi’s war from a group of rabbis who also proclaim their Zionism would be a good start, too. If they want to generate headlines, here’s a modest suggestion: Excommunicate him.
Well, of course, us Jews don’t really do that, inasmuch as internal disagreement is the essence of Jewish life, and there’s no pope, or board of rabbis, outside of ultra-Orthodox communities, which claims the authority to do that. A quick tour around Wikipedia (in this instance, the poor man’s Talmud, particularly if, like me, he’s secular) discovered that some ultra-Orthodox Haredi sects have infrequently gone in for a version of this, but not lately. The most famous excommunicated Jew was Baruch Spinoza, but that was nearly 400 years ago. My Talmudic dive into Wikipedia tells me that the Orthodox rabbis of Ukraine, when it was under the control of the German army in 1918, excommunicated Leon Trotsky, then leader of the Red Army, who was probably surprised by this inasmuch he had long since stopped considering himself to have any religious identity at all.
What got me thinking about excommunication at all was the news that came earlier this month that the Vatican had excommunicated Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for refusing to recognize the authority of Pope Francis, and opposing the reforms of the 1960s’ Second Vatican Council, which have governed the Church ever since. (For all I know, Vigano may also oppose the Church’s very belated concession that Galileo was right when he said the Earth orbited the sun, for which he was accused of heresy and threatened with torture until he recanted.) What really left me dumbstruck was that excommunication was still a practice in which any institution larger than a cult engaged. (Well, with the exception of authoritarian political parties; see, e.g., the Stalinists vs. Trotsky and Bukharin; and the Trumpites vs. Kevin McCarthy et al.)
On the one hand, then, mainstream American Jews—secular, Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox—have never even thought about excommunication; it’s nowhere in their respective playbooks or prayer books. On the other hand, if there’s a Jew who has done more to flout, with bloody consequences, the core belief of the majority of Jews in the American diaspora—the belief in universal rights, which is an existential belief for a minority group in a democracy—it’s Bibi. I have no interest, and no claim to legitimacy, in plowing new theological ground, but speaking as a secular Jewish leftie who doesn’t want to cede the protests to supporters of Hamas, and who does want the moral claims of what I think is the majority of American Jewry to be heard, excommunication would be one, albeit out-there, way to go.
And as Hillel famously said, if not now, when?
