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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 80th anniversary remembered with daffodils, 3 presidents and an 11th commandment against ‘indifference’
WARSAW (JTA) — Exactly 80 years ago, a few hundred ragtag, half-starved Jews emerged from sewers in Warsaw to battle Nazis – and held them off for nearly a month rather than surrender themselves and their Jewish brethren to the Treblinka and Majdanek death camps.
On Wednesday, thousands of Poles and international visitors, including Polish President Andrzej Duda, Israeli President Issac Herzog and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in a stirring Holocaust commemoration festooned with daffodils, the emergent symbol of the largest Jewish rebellion against the Nazis during World War II.
“As German federal president, I stand before you today and bow to the courageous fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Steinmeier told a few hundred politicians, Jewish leaders and others at the Ghetto Heroes Monument, marking the first time a German president has joined in the annual commemoration. “I stand before you today and ask for your forgiveness for the crimes committed here by Germans.”
This was also the first time leaders from all three countries came together for the official uprising ceremony to commemorate the fighters, none of whom are alive today. The last surviving fighter, Simcha Rathajzer-Rotem, also known as Kazik, died in December 2018. A handful of Warsaw Ghetto survivors who were not old enough to join the fighting remain, according to Holocaust scholars.
In another first, the three heads of state attended a commemorative service led by Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schdurich at Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue. By the end of the ceremony, which was conducted mostly in Hebrew and featured Polish-Jewish children singing the Polish and Israeli national anthems, many attendees had tears in their eyes.
“I just thought, the leaders are here, this is something we should do, it’s part of building relationships and collective memory that partnerships are built on,” Schudrich told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Earlier in the day, Polish President Duda called the fighters “the heroes of the Jews all over the world” and “the heroes of Poland and the Poles.”
Herzog, a day after Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, praised the fighters for sparking hope during one of humanity’s most tragic times. “In a world falling apart, in the shadow of death, under conditions of humiliation, famine, and forced labor, in the ghettos… they succeeded — mothers, fathers, children, grandfathers, and grandmothers — in upholding human morality, mutual responsibility, faith and basic humanity,” he said.
From left to right: German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Israeli President Issac Herzog hold hands before the 80th anniversary commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in front of the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, April 19, 2023. (German Government Press Office/Getty Images)
Wednesday’s diplomatic tribute, which also included speeches by World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder and Marian Turski, a Lodz Ghetto survivor whose so-called 11th commandment — “Thou shalt not be indifferent” — became the slogan for programming by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews around the commemoration.
Eleven years ago, POLIN commissioned Jewish artist Helena Czernek to design a simple paper flower daffodil that has since been worn on the uprising’s anniversary to raise awareness of the day. The pin design was inspired by a commander of the uprising, Marek Edelman, who died in 2009. Each year he would receive a bouquet of daffodils to mark the anniversary date from an anonymous sender, and he would in turn place them on the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes — a large sculpture standing at the site of the uprising’s first battle.
The daffodil marker has since changed the landscape of Holocaust memory in Poland, according to POLIN museum spokeswoman Marta Dziewulska.
“Our research shows that since we began our educational programs around this event, including handing out the daffodils, the rise in general public knowledge about the uprising has been enormous,” said Dziewulska.
This year, thanks in part to financial support from Lauder, a billionaire heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and a major Republican donor, the daffodil campaign reached far more people than ever, both in Poland and beyond. Throughout the center of Warsaw, the paper daffodil was ubiquitous among pedestrians and cafe dwellers across generations. All crew members on LOT Polish airline flights wore them.
For the first time, the daffodils were also distributed to 150,000 people in 100 Jewish communities around the world. More than 3,000 volunteers gave out 450,000 paper daffodils in six cities across Poland, and over 7,000 schools, libraries and cultural institutions participated in the museum’s daffodil campaign, which includes films and educational materials about the uprising.
Helena Czernek designed the paper daffodil over a decade ago. (Dinah Spritzer)
Krystyna Budnicka, who was 11 at the time of the uprising, told journalists about her story on Monday. The fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) were armed with home-made grenades and Molotov cocktails. In the end, roughly 13,000 Jews were were burnt alive or suffocated as the Nazis burnt down the ghetto to quell the rebellion, sending the remaining some 50,000 Jews to be murdered further east.
Budnicka told the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza that “as the ghetto was burning, the underground was like a bread oven.”
But Budnicka and some of her 10 immediate family members, none of whom survived the Holocaust, had one advantage. Her brothers and father were observant Jews who happened to be carpenters. They had constructed a bunker to lead to the sewers so that eventually, at least she and her brother, who later died of typhus, were able to make it out.
Budnicka was later taken in by a Catholic orphanage while the war was still raging and hid her Jewish identity, changing her last name to Kuczer. Until the 1990s, she told almost no one of her travels. But today she is the ambassador of POLIN Museum.
Her recollection of life at the time is limited, except that she had hope for survival. The fighters slept during the day in bunkers the Nazis couldn’t easily find, and came out of the sewers to fight at night. She remembers hunger, being the only girl among many boys and dreaming about what bread tasted like, a distant memory.
Many decades later, after the end of the Communist dictatorship, a “Children of the Holocaust” association was formed in Poland. For the first time, Budnicka and many others started telling their stories out loud, and at schools.
“Now I feel that I have to do it,” she told Gazeta Wyborcza. “When I mention my loved ones at meetings, it’s like I’m erecting a monument to my family. They live then. I see them. It’s in order: my mother Cyrla, father Josef Lejzor, brothers Izaak, Boruch, Szaja, Chaim, Rafał.”
Budnicka is not the only Warsaw Ghetto survivor to ask the world to remember what she endured. Helena Birnbaum, 93, who also survived by hiding in a bunker, participated in this year’s March of the Living — an annual Holocaust remembrance event that brings thousands of participants from around the world to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She told reporters at the march on Tuesday why she flew all the way to Poland from Israel to talk about her ordeal.
“The importance of knowing about the Holocaust is to know the person in all situations, on the brink of death,” she said. “The importance of knowing that the Holocaust was life within death and not everyone died at once. The individual stories matter.”
An iconic photo from the Warsaw Ghetto shows Jews being led by Nazis in 1943. (U.S. Holocaust Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
The act of international unity in display at the official uprising ceremony comes at a time when Poland’s right-wing government continues to espouse a nationalist narrative that international scholars say downplays Polish antisemitism and violence towards Jews before, during and after World War II. Multiple Polish laws connected to Holocaust rhetoric and restitution payments caused diplomatic tensions between Poland and Israel for years, and the two only resumed more full relations last month. The rapprochement came after Israel’s foreign minister announced the resumption of Israeli student trips to Holocaust sites in Poland, which now could include sites that explain Nazi violence against non-Jewish Poles.
Six years ago, some Polish Jews who rejected their government’s patriotic narrative launched their own uprising commemoration, which has grown from a group of hundreds to nearly a thousand. During the alternative commemoration on Wednesday, which featured Yiddish songs sung by school children and recitations of poetry by Polish-Jewish authors, participants laid paper and real daffodils at Warsaw Ghetto monuments such as Umschlagplatz, where the Nazis deportee 350,000 Jews by train to Treblinka.
Patrycja Dolowy, director of Warsaw’s Jewish community center, was an early supporter of what she called a grassroots alternative to the pomp and circumstance of the government’s ceremony, only a few hundred feet away.
“Jews were sentenced to death in the center of their own city and the majority of people outside the ghetto were doing nothing about this,” said Dolowy, who believes government focus on heroism should not erase inquiry into less heroic actions by Poles.
“If Jews were not treated before the war as strangers, it would have been much easier for everyone, Jews and non-Jews, to rise together and resist,” she theorized.
The counter-commemoration reflects the contrasting attitudes in Poland towards honoring Jewish and Holocaust memory. In 2017, the government passed a law that assured public schools taught history from a heroic, patriotic perspective, and in 2018 made it illegal to insult the Polish nation’s Holocaust record, condemning scholars who dared delve into historical Polish aggression against Jews.
Attendees shown at an alternative Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration, which has grown in recent years. (Dinah Spritzer)
Jerzy Warman, 76, a Polish-born Jew participating in the non-governmental commemoration whose parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto, said the Polish government wants to turn the uprising commemoration into an event where “they can do a roll call of Poles who they say helped the Jews.”
Warman noted that his father joined Edelman at the Warsaw Uprising, a major Polish resistance campaign that took place year after the Ghetto Uprising. “The Jews tried to join the Polish Home Army as a group but were rejected by them,” Warman recalled his father explaining.
Moshe Kis, 22, a Jewish political science student from Warsaw whose grandmother spent two years in the ghetto, echoed Warman’s view.
“So many people here still don’t understand their own history,” said Kis, who will immigrate to Israel next year. He added, fiddling with a daffodil over coffee, “when the sirens went off today in honor of the uprising, I heard people around me saying on the street, ‘what is this for, are we being invaded?’”
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CAIR Connecticut urges Greenwich schools to stop using Eisner Camp over Israel ties
(JTA) — GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. – Greenwich Public Schools in Connecticut said it would proceed with a planned fall trip for sixth graders at a Jewish camp in Massachusetts as planned this week, despite pressure from a Muslim advocacy organization over the camp’s Israeli symbols and Israel-related programming.
CAIR Connecticut, the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, objected to the trip, saying that programming at Eisner Camp in Great Barrington “incorporates connections to Israel,” the chapter’s board chair Farhan Memon wrote in a letter to Greenwich Superintendent of Schools Toni Jones dated Oct. 13.
The four-day Greenwich Schools field trip was organized by the Outdoor Classroom project, which works with seven locations in New England, including Eisner. Four of the camps are affiliated with Christian organizations, and two have no religious affiliation. With its clients, Outdoor Classroom coordinates nature-related learning programs for kids.
Memon wrote that some parents in Greenwich had viewed a video and photos of previous school events at Eisner and “identified Israeli flags and yellow ribbons prominently displayed in spaces used during school visits.”
“At the very least, spaces used by Greenwich students on any school trip should be free of national and political displays,” Memon wrote.
Eisner director Paul Isserles said in a statement shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “We welcome Outdoor Classroom to use our camp facilities. Throughout the year many outside organizations rent our facilities for various programs. URJ Eisner Camp is proud to have an Israeli flag displayed for our camp programs.”
When it comes to visiting groups, “Frankly, we are not regularly asked to do anything to remove those symbols or to cover them,” said Union for Reform Judaism president Rabbi Rick Jacobs in a telephone interview with JTA. “Because to be honest, we wouldn’t.”
Answering Memon’s letter on Oct. 14, Jones wrote in an email that her school district “acknowledges that individuals and families have vastly different views regarding global events” and that it intends to “provide an inclusive and safe educational environment for all Greenwich Public School students, including when they are on field trips under our care.”
She added that she had “made it clear to a few families that we will not take a political or religious stand.” JTA has seen both the CAIR letter and the email response.
CAIR Connecticut did not respond to JTA’s query.
CAIR’s national website says the organization promotes interfaith dialogue and “condemns all acts of violence against civilians by any individual, group or state.”
The Reform movement founded the 600-acre camp in 1958 as the Joseph Eisner Camp Institute for Living Judaism. It is located in the Berkshire Hills south of the town center of Great Barrington.
It is one of more than a dozen of the movement’s overnight camps in the North America. Many of those camps are rented throughout the year by groups that have nothing to do with Judaism, URJ’s Rabbi Jacobs said. “If a group rents the camp, they come up with their own agenda,” he said.
He added, “There are flags and other symbols of Judaism and of Israel in our camps, and we’re proud of that.”
Some parents had raised concerns about the venue as early as March. CAIR urged the district to stop using the camp in the Oct. 14 letter.
Removing decorations from the camp would not be enough, he said, noting that parents were upset after seeing promotional material about Eisner bringing Jewish campers to visit Israeli army bases under the Gadna, an Israeli military youth program.
A July 2019 post on Eisner Camp’s website says a group of participants in its Israel trip chose Gadna, stayed at an army base, practiced drills and learned to shoot at a target.
“URJ Eisner Camp participants who go to Israel have not participated in Gadna since 2023,” camp director Isserles said in a statement provided to JTA. “Our Israel programming at camp and in Israel is focused on Jewish identity, community, education, and connection to Israel.”
What CAIR is saying is that “A Jewish institution can be an unfit place for public-school children because it is visibly Jewish and identifies openly with Israel,” wrote blogger and Eisner alumnus Rabbi Jeff Salkin in his “Unfiltered” Substack on Oct. 19.
“A Jewish institution should not have to hide its Jewish identity to count as a fit place for other people’s children. You would not ask a church camp to remove a cross, or a Muslim camp to take down a crescent. A standard that demands such hiding makes Jewish identity itself the problem,” Salkin wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post CAIR Connecticut urges Greenwich schools to stop using Eisner Camp over Israel ties appeared first on The Forward.
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Who are the first time voters who could sway Israel’s election?
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — On Oct. 27, Yael Chernyvsky, 18, from Ramat Hasharon in central Israel, plans to cast her ballot for the first time.
“I’m voting so we can change the future of this country,” the teen told Jewish Telegraphic Agency earlier this month. She was entering a Tel Aviv auditorium where some of Israel’s top politicians were about to address more than 1,000 first-time voters, including many in pre-military programs.
Chernyvsky, who is studying in an army preparation program in the Negev, blames the current right-wing government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the country’s problems.
So she said she will vote for one of the opposition parties in the “change bloc,” which seeks to oust Netanyahu, who has been in office since 2009 except for a brief period in 2021-2022.
Chernyvsky had not decided which party she will vote for, but she said it will “probably” be either the Democrats led by Yair Golan or Yashar led by Gadi Eisenkot.
“We’ve basically had the same government for 20 years, and I genuinely think it’s corrupt. Why has this war been going on for three years? Why did it take two years to return the hostages? Why does the government give so much money to Haredi Jews who don’t work and don’t serve in the army?”
Chernyvsky is one of the estimated 640,000 Israelis aged 18 to 22 eligible to vote in Tuesday’s election, according to the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI). Comprising nearly 10% of the electorate, their votes could determine as many as 12 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
“Israel is a young country with a high birth rate,” said Tammy Hoffman, head of the education policy program at the IDI, which co-sponsored the young voter event with the Yigal Allon Center. “If their turnout is high, as our research suggests, first-time voters will make a difference.”
In May, Hoffman and her colleagues surveyed potential young first-time Jewish and Arab voters about their attitudes and political engagement. Across Israel’s population groups, 80% to 95% said they would “definitely” or be likely to vote. Secular Jewish youth expressed the highest level of certainty regarding participation, while 87% of Arabs said they intend to vote.
It’s a higher percentage than in the U.S., where the youth turnout in the 2024 presidential election was only 47%, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
More than four-fifths of respondents to the IDI survey described the opportunity to vote as either “fairly meaningful” or “very meaningful,” with particularly strong responses among traditional and religious Jewish youth.
A separate poll of 18-year-old to 22-year-old potential first-time voters for the Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth news outlets also revealed high motivation: 67% of respondents said they were certain they would vote, while another 19% thought they would.
In both polls, national security and the cost of living were top priorities for both Jews and Arabs. Hoffman wasn’t surprised.
“For the past several years, they’ve lived in an unstable environment during their adolescence. They were in junior high during COVID, they witnessed the judicial reform protests, and of course Oct. 7. They are worried about their future.”
While the Hamas attack affected every Israeli, the fact that so many first-time voters are either serving in the Israel Defense Forces or will do so in the near future could influence how they vote.
Jewish Israeli voters of all ages have moved rightward politically over the past couple of decades, Hoffman noted.
“But military service doesn’t necessarily lead you to a nationalist stance,” Hoffman emphasized. “It can do the opposite: It can bring up questions about the war and its goals.”
Arab Israelis, meanwhile, haven’t shifted rightward, but they are more eager to vote in this election than previous elections, reflecting their growing engagement in Israeli society, Hoffman said.
In a Sept. 23 N12 poll, 74% of young people described their political views as right-wing or center-right, while 23% identified as left-wing or center-left. If the election were held at the time the poll was taken, 16% of respondents would vote for Eisenkot’s Yashar party and 14% would vote for Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Despite the assumption that the majority of Jewish youth will vote for right-wing and far-right parties, Hoffman said, mock elections at high schools around the country show a different picture.
She said the majority of students voted for Eisenkot’s Yashar party and Beyachad, led by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid from the opposition Change bloc, and “some for Netanyahu’s [right-wing] Likud, but not a lot for [Itamar] Ben-Gvir,” who heads a far-right party.
Omer Gross from Jerusalem, who graduated from high school in June and is now in an army-prep program in the Golan, plans to vote for the Religious Zionist party led by far-right politicians Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Moshe Feiglin.
“I don’t really agree with what Smotrich has been doing in Gaza,” he said, referring to Smotrich’s objective to reestablish the uprooted Jewish settlements in Gaza and incentivize Palestinian emigration from the strip, “but I support what he does in the territories” – the West Bank. “We need a strong, secure Israel.”
Tomer Shiloh from Herziliyah, who attends the same Golan Heights program as his friend Omer, has different plans.
“I’m voting for the ‘Change’ bloc, for Gadi Eisenkot or Naftali Bennett,” the 18-year-old said.
If it were up to Shiloh, the next government would require Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, young men to serve in the IDF, as he will do next year. He wants the next government to lower Israel’s high cost of living.
“I want the people who run this country to have good values and to do what’s best for the country and not for themselves,” the teen said.
Sgt. M is a 22-year-old office worker doing his first stint of reserve duty following the conclusion of his mandatory army service. He says ensuring that all Israelis serve the country either in the IDF or through National Service is at the top of his election priority list. But he will be voting for the left-of-center Democrats party mostly for economic reasons.
“Did you know that most university students have to work while they study to pay for tuition, books, food and housing?” the reservist, who requested anonymity due to IDF regulations, said as he traveled home by train from his army base. “I wanted to start studying right after finishing the army, but between the cost and reserve duty, that’s impossible,” he said.
Speaking from his home in the northern Israeli city of Shef-Amra, Khalel Alaa Sabeh, 18, said he plans to vote for an Arab party that will prioritize addressing resource gaps in the Arab community.
“I want to see more money allocated to the Arab community,” he said, noting that historically, Arab municipalities have received less government funding than Jewish municipalities. “But most of all, I want our families to be safe. There’s a lot of crime in the Arab sector and the Netanyahu government isn’t doing enough to stop it.”
Sabeh, who plans to start university next year, said he is urging his friends to show up to vote on Oct. 27.
“I want to see change in this country, and if Netanyahu wins we’ll have four more bad years.” Yet whatever the outcome on Election Day, he said, “I won’t leave the country. This is my land, this is my home.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Who are the first time voters who could sway Israel’s election? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s global image is deteriorating. Why isn’t it a bigger issue in the election?
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Over the past few months, Israeli media has been full of reports of Israeli holidaymakers in Europe, Asia and the Americas being harassed or physically attacked after being identified as Israeli.
In July, a group of Israeli tourists visiting Montenegro were reportedly confronted by a man and a woman, apparently locals, who asked, “Taking a break from genocide?” and told them to stay in Israel. In Greece, an Israeli woman said a restaurant refused to serve her after she told an employee she was from Israel.
In Thailand, a mother and daughter were allegedly beaten after they told a man they were from Israel, according to the mother’s account.. And in the U.S., an Israeli couple checking into a hotel in California were asked if they were “baby killers.”
These reports come as Israel’s image around the world has fallen to historic lows. A Pew poll conducted between February and May this year found that across 36 countries, a median of 67% of adults held an unfavorable view of Israel.
On the diplomatic front, hostility is also growing. Israel’s ongoing military action in Gaza has been termed “disproportionate” by a growing number of world leaders, and unchecked violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank – as well as Israeli government policy there – has prompted some countries, including some considered allies, to pull back or even impose sanctions.
Despite this hostility the issue of Israel’s diplomacy, its image worldwide and who is to blame for its deterioration is barely factoring into the fast-approaching election on Oct. 27.
Yaakov Katz, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that there have been complaints about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government not being effective at explaining Israel’s policies or actions to international audiences. Nevertheless, most Israelis see this as a problem beyond their control, he added.
“There is the argument that Netanyahu makes, which is that no matter what we do, the whole world’s against us, and no matter what we say, it’s antisemitism,” said Katz, co-author of “While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East.” “People accept that argument, and to a large extent, they don’t push back on it. Why? Because part of it is true, right?”
Katz pointed out that many Israelis believe the sharp rise in antisemitism worldwide would keep happening regardless of what Israel does.
“In other words, Israelis believe that even if the number killed in Gaza was not 70,000 but 10,000, you still would have genocide claims; it makes no difference,” he said, adding that the average Israeli does not fully understand that declining support, particularly in the U.S., could eventually have “existential consequences for the country.”
“Most people here don’t think that far ahead,” Katz said. Instead, they take comfort in news such as President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu, he added.
Ofir Dayan, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said, however, that Israelis are painfully aware of what is happening abroad and are concerned about it. But she said there are other, more pressing issues in a country that has been grappling with more than three years of war.
“When people talk about the elections and what the Netanyahu government did right or wrong, they definitely look at this issue, and it is something they care about,” Dayan said.
However, she continued, most are unlikely to vote for a party or a candidate based on their position on this issue because it is just not a priority.
“Israeli voters are very much one-issue voters, and the issue in this election is security,” Dayan said. “We’re not remote enough from Oct. 7 for people to completely shift their vote and vote based on this idea.”
In addition to security and the questions surrounding the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attack, Peter Lerner, the former Israel Defense Forces spokesman for the international press, told JTA that the “issue of Israel’s international standing is secondary to two things: Netanyahu or not Netanyahu, and the left vs. the right.”
“Obviously, each one of those comes with its own package of Oct. 7-related issues and the question of who is most suited to deal with the threats that are around us,” he said, adding, “you just don’t see very many talking about it and when they do talk about it, it is secondary to everything else.”
Of the dozen or so parties expected to win seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, only a few have referred to Israel’s negative global image or suggested ways to improve public diplomacy.
The B’Yachad Party, headed by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, is one of those discussing it as part of a plan to repair ties between Israel and world Jewry. Under this plan, the party hopes to elevate the importance of Diaspora Jewry, allowing a non-voting observer in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to focus on such issues.
Amcha Yisrael, a new right-wing party led by former IDF Brig. Gen. Ofer Winter, has two candidates on its list who are prominent public diplomacy activists – Yoseph Haddad and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. Haddad has said multiple times that he would like to be Israel’s next minister for public diplomacy.
Journalist Eylon Levy, a former spokesman for the Israeli government, told JTA’s “Waiting for 61” podcast that public diplomacy, or hasbara as Israelis refer to it, “is not a goal in itself” for most of the candidates.
He said the discussion was more about “who can manage relations with the world so that we can achieve our national interests.”
Within that framework, Levy pointed out, there is a range of opinions. On the far right, the approach of the Otzma Yehudit Party, led by Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, is to make Israel look tough and “screw the woolly-hearted soft liberals if they don’t like it.”
On the left, “the position may be equally detached from reality,” Levy said.
“There is a belief on the left that if Israel starts behaving like a normal country and doesn’t have ministers who say aggressive nonsense, then Israel’s relations will snap back to normal,” he said. “I think there may be a denial there of how much public opinion has shifted against Israel and how much the expectations of policymakers have shifted as well.”
While Levy said he did not believe there would be a massive change in perceptions if a new government were elected on Oct. 27, he did believe it would be given a grace period, at least by Israel’s less-than-friendly allies.
“The question is whether an alternative government would suddenly magically boost Israel’s international standing; I don’t think it will,” he said. “But I do think a more moderate government will buy Israel some goodwill, definitely among those who say, in theory, we support Israel.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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