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Netanyahu’s new government could lose a critical constituency: American conservatives
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The op-ed was typical of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page, extolling the virtues of moderation in all things.
The difference was that the author of the piece published Wednesday, Bezalel Smotrich, has a reputation for extremism, and the political landscape he was imagining is in Israel, not America.
Experts who track the U.S.-Israel relationship say the op-ed had a clear purpose: to quell the fears of American conservatives whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long cultivated as allies and who may be rattled by his new extremist partners in governing Israel.
Those partners include Smotrich, the Religious Zionist bloc leader and self-described “proud homophobe” whom Israeli intelligence officials have accused of planning terrorist attacks — and who was sworn in as finance minister in Netanyahu’s new government Thursday. They also include Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted of incitement for his past support of Jewish terrorists, who will oversee Israel’s police.
The presence of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and their parties in Netanyahu’s governing coalition has alarmed American liberals, including some in the Biden administration. But insiders say conservatives are feeling spooked, too.
“The conservative right was with [Netanyahu] and now he seems to be riding the tiger of the radical right,” said David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who just returned from a tour of Israel where he met with senior officials of both the outgoing and incoming governments. “And I think that is bound to alienate the very people who counted on him being risk-averse and to focus on the economy.”
In his op-ed published on Tuesday, two days before the new Israeli government was sworn in, Smotrich sought to persuade Americans that the new government is not the hotbed of ultranationalist and religious extremism it has been made out to be in the American press.
“The U.S. media has vilified me and the traditionalist bloc to which I belong since our success in Israel’s November elections,” he wrote. “They say I am a right-wing extremist and that our bloc will usher in a ‘halachic state’ in which Jewish law governs. In reality, we seek to strengthen every citizen’s freedoms and the country’s democratic institutions, bringing Israel more closely in line with the liberal American model.”
The op-ed is at odds with the stated aims of the coalition agreements; whereas Smotrich says there will be no legal changes to disputed areas in the West Bank, the agreements include a pledge to annex areas at an unspecified time, and to legalize outposts deemed illegal even under Israeli law. He says changes to religious practice will not involve coercion, but the agreement allows businesses to decline service “because of a religious belief,” which a member of his party has anticipated could extend to declining service to LGBTQ people.
Netanyahu has alienated the American left with his relentless attacks on its preference for a two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he perceives as dangerous and naive. (He also differs from them on how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.) He has instead cultivated a base on the right through close ties with the Republican Party and among evangelicals, made possible in part because he has long espoused the values traditional conservatives hold dear, including free markets and a united robust Western stance against extremism and terrorism.
But his alliance with Smotrich and others perceived as theocratic extremists may be a bridge too far even for Netanyahu’s conservative friends, who champion democratic values overseas, said Dov Zakheim, a veteran defense official in multiple Republican administrations.
“Traditional conservatives are much closer to the Bushes, and Jim Baker and those sorts of folks,” he said, referring to the two former presidents and the secretary of state under the late George H. W. Bush.
Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the op-ed was likely written at Netanyahu’s behest with those conservatives in mind.
“The Wall Street Journal piece was designed to appeal to traditional conservatives,” he said. “It was designed to send a message to the American public writ large that the way in which Smotrich and perhaps [Itamar] Ben Gvir have been described is based on past utterances and not necessarily their forward-looking policies.”
The immediate predicate for the op-ed, insiders say, was likely a New York Times editorial on Dec. 17 that called the incoming government “a significant threat to the future of Israel” because of the extremist positions Smotrich and other partners have embraced, including the annexation of the West Bank, restrictions on non-Orthodox and non-Jewish citizens, diminishing the independence of the courts, reforming the Law of Return that would render ineligible huge chunks of Diaspora Jewry, and anti-LGBTQ measures.
Smotrich in his op-ed casts the changes not as radical departures from democratic norms but as tweaks that would align Israel more with U.S. values. He said he would pursue a “broad free-market policy” as finance minister. He likened religious reforms to the Supreme Court decision that allowed Christian service providers to decline work from LGBTQ couples.
“For example, arranging for a minuscule number of sex-separated beaches, as we propose, scarcely limits the choices of the majority of Israelis who prefer mixed beaches,” Smotrich wrote. “It simply offers an option to others.”
In the West Bank, Smotrich said, his finance ministry would promote the building of infrastructure and employment which would benefit Israeli Jewish settlers and Palestinians alike. “This doesn’t entail changing the political or legal status of the area.”
Such salves contradict the stated aims of the new government’s coalition agreement, Anshel Pfeffer, a Netanyahu biographer and analyst for Haaretz said in a Twitter thread picking apart Smotrich’s op-ed.
“Smotrich says his policy doesn’t mean changing the political or legal status of the occupied territories while annexation actually appears in the coalition agreement and his plans certainly change the legal status of the settlements,” Pfeffer said.
Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said foreign media alarm at the composition of the incoming government was premature.
“I suspect that the vast mass of people will maintain the support that they have for Israel because it hasn’t got anything to do with the passing of one government to another and has everything to do with the principle that Israel is a pro-American democracy in a region that’s pretty important,” she said.
That said, Pletka said, the changes in policy embraced by Smotrich and his cohort could alienate Americans should they become policy.
“I think a lot of things can change if the rhetoric from Netanyahu’s government becomes policy, but right now, it’s rhetoric,” she said. “What you tend to see in normal governments is that they need to make a series of compromises between rhetoric that plays to their base and governance.”
Pletka said Netanyahuu’s stated ambition to expand the 2020 Abraham Accords to peace with Saudi Arabia would likely inhibit plans by Smotrich to annex the West Bank. In the summer of 2020, the last time Netanyahu planned annexation, the United Arab Emirates, one of the four Arab Parties to the Abraham Accords, threatened to pull out unless Netanyahu pulled back — which he did.
“It’s not just the relationship with the United States,” she said. “This might alienate their new friends in the Gulf, which, at the end of the day, may actually have more serious consequences.”
Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to relay the impression that he will keep his coalition partners on a short leash.
“They’re joining me, I’m not joining them,” he said earlier this month. “I’ll have two hands firmly on the steering wheel. I won’t let anybody do anything to LGBT [people] or to deny our Arab citizens their rights or anything like that.”
Zakheim said that Netanyahu, who is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, from 1996 to 1999 and then from 2009 to 2021, has proven chops at steering rangy coalitions — but there are two key differences now.
Netanyahu wants his coalition partners to pass a law that would effectively end his trial for criminal fraud, and so they exercise unprecedented leverage over him. Additionally, Netanyahu in the past has faced the greatest pressure from haredi Orthodox parties, who are susceptible to suasion by funding their impoverished sector. That’s not true of his new ideologically driven partners.
“If you look at his past governments, he has really never been forced into real policy decisions by those to the right of him,” Zekheim said. “Now he’s got a problem because these 15 or so seats of those to his right are interested in policy, not just in money.”
Makovsky said Netanyahu appears to be leaving behind a conservatism that was sympathetic to the outlook of its American counterpart.
“His success has been that he’s a stabilizer. He’s risk-averse. He’s focused on the prosperity of the country, with high-tech success. He’s the one to be seen as the tenacious guardian against Iranian nuclear influence,” he said. “And those are things people could relate to. Now, it just seems like he’s just throwing the playbook out the window.”
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Progressive Jews are trying out post-Zionism. There’s one big flaw in their approach
The data is clear: American Jews are feeling increasingly alienated from Zionism. But a new progressive coalition is failing to reckon with why the Zionist ideology their members mostly reject was so powerful in the first place.
On May 18, more than 40 Jewish organizations launched the Jewish Diaspora Movement, which, in their words, rejects “the vision of Judaism that is state-centric, militarist, ethno-nationalist.” The organizations declared on their website they want to build “an ethical future for Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism” and that they “joyfully view wherever we are in the entire world as our home.” They charge the Jewish establishment with “conflating antizionism with antisemitism” and “refusing to engage in meaningful dialogue with dissenters.”
JDM is right that too many Jewish spaces exclude thoughtful criticism of Israel. But even as it seeks to build new Jewish spaces, where Jews can live freely and practice their version of Judaism without hindrance, JDM isn’t reckoning with the fact that Zionism itself sprang out of exactly this kind of desire for Jewish self-determination — or the clear historical explanations for why it did.
What the movement is
Rabbi Alissa Wise, one of JDM’s organizers, has said the rollout was meant to be “an agitation.”
The founding members of the Jewish Diaspora Movement include Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Rabbis for Ceasefire, the American Council for Judaism and the magazine Jewish Currents, as well as synagogues and prayer groups in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Hartford, Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.
JDM has no executive, no paid staff, and no physical location. It says it will be run horizontally, through a referendum of member organizations, under the fiscal sponsorship of a project called Beloved Garden, supported by the Fetzer Institute and Henry Luce Foundation.
Whatever one makes of its aims, JDM is a serious attempt to build parallel Jewish institutions, based on an old argument made new again.
The flawed argument of ‘hereness’
As the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, a different vision for the Jewish future was emerging in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The Jewish Labor Bund emphasized doikayt, or “hereness,” the idea that a Jew’s future belongs to the place where they already live. The Bundist theorist Vladimir Medem argued in 1920 that “a national home in Palestine would not end the Jewish exile.” The Jewish Diaspora Movement makes the same point: that “all Jews live in diaspora.”
The Bund was right that Jews should be able to live freely in whatever community they were already in, whether it’s Vilnius or Warsaw, Baghdad or Tehran, Paris or Amsterdam, Buenos Aires or New York. But the reason Jews so intensely debated questions of home and future was largely because of forces outside of their control.
My late grandfather did not choose to be deported from Lithuania, the birthplace of the Bund, to a Soviet gulag. My grandmother did not choose, as a young child, to run away from her Polish neighbors who chased her and other Jews in her town with sticks and knives. The Jews who had lived across the Islamic world for centuries did not choose to be expelled after the creation of the State of Israel. Whether they believed in “hereness” as an ideology turned out not to matter.
Even today, emigration to Israel is frequently driven not by idealistic Zionism or a rejection of the diaspora, but by the cold calculus of safety. Many contemporary French and British Jews, for example, describe the sense that they have no future in the place where they grew up. They are not dismissing “the joy of intermixing and learning from our non-Jewish friends and neighbors,” which JDM describes as one of its core values. Rather, they are increasingly — and justifiably, amid an upsurge in violent antisemitic attacks — scared of their neighbors.
It’s telling that across a lengthy FAQ and thousands of words on their site, the single mention the Jewish Diaspora Movement makes of antisemitism appears to be an objection to conflating it with anti-Zionism.
A flawed reaction to a real issue
JDM is right to point out the ways in which establishment Jewish spaces have shut off criticism of Israel, including foundations who cut off funding for Jewish organizations that speak in favor of Palestinians and rabbis who have been fired for talking about Gaza.
Years ago, while interning at a legacy Jewish institution, I pressed its leadership on their silence about Palestinian casualties during Israel’s 2021 Guardian of the Walls Gaza operation. The head of the organization told me that he held his tongue because there was enough criticism out there already — even as he allowed that people inside the organization might privately object to some of Israel’s actions.
Mainstream Jewish leaders increasingly recognize, however, that shutting down criticism risks creating alienation. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute warned on a podcast this past January that narrowing the bounds of acceptable dissent threatens “to irreparably change the boundaries of Jewish identity itself.”
For many counter- and anti-Zionists, opposing Zionism offers the clearest way to stand against the things Israel does wrong. But JDM, at least in one domain, risks taking things too far.
To say that “all Jews live in diaspora, even those who live in Jerusalem” as JDM does, is to tell nearly half the world’s Jews that the place they live is not really home — even if JDM may view diaspora as a theological or spiritual condition rather than a geographic one.
It’s one thing to say Jewish people don’t need to center Israel to live a full Jewish life. It’s quite another thing to tell Israelis themselves that the place they see as home isn’t. Just as it’s fair to say that legacy Jewish organizations shouldn’t get to define a single diaspora attitude toward Israel, it’s fair for Israelis to say this new diaspora organization shouldn’t get to define them.
Rather than seek to redefine, JDM might follow the example of someone like the progressive Zionist author Joshua Leifer, who resigned as a contributing editor from Jewish Currents after Oct. 7. In his book Tablets Shattered, Leifer writes that the “ethical task of global Jewish life is now to make the modern experiment in Jewish sovereignty a just one.” Or like Rabbi Sharon Brous, a progressive Zionist, who has described the war in Gaza as a spiritual catastrophe.
Neither of these figures loosened their attachment to Israel to make room for their criticism.
Escalating Alienation
American Jewish life is being driven to the extremes by escalating alienation. Each side increasingly acts as if to acknowledge the other’s valid points is a concession they cannot afford. And each such refusal becomes the next side’s alibi for digging in.
Many Jews live somewhere in the middle. They might believe a Jewish state has a right to exist, and be critical of the Israeli government.
I count myself among them. I’m an American Israeli who is furious at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and those who ignore the state’s misconduct. But I’ve simultaneously become estranged from former friends and colleagues on the political left who have engaged in Hamas apologism and crossed the line into antisemitism.
So I understand JDM’s impulse to create a communal space for those who feel excluded, even if I wouldn’t feel at home in their framework.
When you feel you cannot live your Judaism freely in the institutions you have, you make your own. But the act of building parallel Jewish spaces concedes that Jews do not simply get to define how we live. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the terms are sometimes set by others, and that the freedom to practice on our own terms must be deliberately built.
That is the animating spirit of Zionism, bubbling up in a movement trying to leave it behind.
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It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
Why have I, a longstanding democratic Zionist who lived in Israel for five years and loves the country passionately, abandoned my belief in a democratic Jewish state?
My short response is that I did not abandon democratic Zionism. Democratic Zionism abandoned me.
More than two-and-half years after Hamas slaughtered close to 1,200 people in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, after Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, growing numbers of liberal Zionist American Jews like me have reached a crossroads. Cognitive dissonance over Israel has left us feeling homeless and bereft.
In our horror at the indiscriminate killing of civilian Palestinians, we are alienated from the mainstream American Zionist echo-chamber, dominated by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC, which rejects almost all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Yet we also cannot make common cause with stridently anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, which demonize Israel and Israelis, with no distinctions, as the enemy.
Fortunately, there is a little known but compelling third way, known as post-Zionism.
Post-Zionism focuses on supporting efforts to build a shared society in which all the people residing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — Israelis and Palestinians alike — can live side by side in peace and security. It sees the structure of this shared society as less important than ending the mentality of “us against them” that has animated both Jewish and Palestinian national movements for more than a century. Such counter-productive ideologies must give way now to a true sharing of the Holy Land, in which the rights of all people are cherished and protected.
A return to principles
Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence contains a promise: the new country would “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
Yet successive Israeli governments led by both left and right-wing Zionist parties have, in the decades since the 1967 Six-Day War, sabotaged the dream of a democratic Jewish state by deliberately building Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. By prioritizing settlements over peace, Israel has worked to ensure that there will be no Palestinian state alongside a democratic Jewish Israel, but instead an apartheid Jewish state ruling over millions of Palestinians without rights.
That means in short, the only morally acceptable form of Zionism has been effectively taken off the table by Israel itself.
Instead, a return to post-Zionism — which emerged in the 1980s, and went into abeyance with the collapse of the Oslo peace process — is called for. Difficult debates over definitions of Zionism aren’t changing anything. To ensure that Israel survives and inspires generations of diaspora Jews to come, a new way forward is needed.
A common land
Roughly equivalent numbers of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs live between the river and the sea. The path down which they are presently hurtling leads directly to mutually assured destruction, and must be abandoned.
The present Israeli course of action — oppressing and seeking to again disperse our Palestinian neighbors in the name of Jewish security — has led to a state of perpetual if unofficial war, which places the security and well-being of Israelis and diaspora Jews at ever-graver risk. The strategy of Palestinians and their supporters around the world — holding out some vague hope that Israel will somehow cease to exist — is similarly dysfunctional.
Post-Zionism, in contrast to both current strategies, advocates acceptance between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and a shared embrace of our common land.
In adopting a post-Zionist perspective, I’ve found a route out of paralysis. And I think it could provide an avenue for Jews like me — who feel alienated from what Israel has become but retain deep ties to it — to contribute to building a shared Israel-Palestine. That coexistence could look like one state, two states, or my personal favorite possibility, an Israeli-Palestinian confederation with two states bonded together by a European Union-like structure. Post-Zionism also allows its adherents to maintain our abiding love for and spiritual connection to the land of Israel; as opposed to anti-Zionist Jews’outright rejection of “next year in Jerusalem.”
Ideological change comes slowly. Substituting the vision of a safe home for Jews in the Middle East for that of an explicitly Jewish state will take time. Right now, the key post-Zionist priority looks much like that of left-Zionism: convincing the Israeli public that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansionist agenda of Jewish-supremacism is morally and politically unsustainable, and to bring about the beginnings of change by ousting his coalition in upcoming elections.
On the domestic front, post-Zionist American Jews must work together to strengthen ties with interfaith allies, including the Muslim community, to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia, and to defend democracy and pluralism. We cannot work for a truly democratic Middle East without a truly democratic government of our own.
Embracing post-Zionism does not mean refusing to work together with Zionists who also want freedom, safety and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians alike. But it means thinking about the course of history that brought us to this point differently. I and so many post-Zionists have come to understand that the ideology of Zionism, while representing genuine liberation for Jews, had within it a fatal flaw: forcing the structure of a Jewish state on a land that was only partly Jewish. The idea that this could somehow have worked out was, from the beginning, a form of self-delusion.
Right now, post-Zionists and left-Zionists are working together fruitfully in collaboration with Palestinians in a variety of movements and NGOs dedicated to peace and reconciliation, including through increasingly prominent groups like Standing Together.
We must continue to open our minds to a broader range of better futures for the Middle East. Every civilian in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank deserves peace, security, justice and equal rights. That possibility may feel far off, but to paraphrase Theodore Herzl himself, if we will it, it is no dream.
Walter Ruby, formerly a Forward correspondent in Moscow, is co-author with Sabeeha Rehman of We Refuse to Be Enemies: How Muslims and Jews Can Make Peace, One Friendship at a Time.
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Majority of House Democrats vote to defeat Lebanon war powers measure
(JTA) — A House resolution aimed at preventing U.S. involvement in hostilities in Lebanon failed Thursday.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat and fierce critic of Israel, forced a vote on the House floor Thursday. It was defeated 324 to 92, with 91 Democrats voting in favor. The sole Republican vote came from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who will be departing Congress next year after losing his primary.
The resolution, which would have ordered President Donald Trump to remove U.S. troops from Lebanon within seven days, was defeated after Democratic Party leaders noted in a joint statement that there are “no U.S. servicemembers involved in combat operations or hostilities in Lebanon.”
The statement issued by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar continued: “We stand with the Lebanese people, the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces in their efforts to live peacefully and defeat Hezbollah, a violent terrorist organization that is a sworn enemy of the United States.”
Jewish Democratic Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Dan Goldman of New York also voted “no” on the resolution, writing in a joint press release that their opposition “should not be taken as an approval of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s prosecution of Israel’s military action in Lebanon.”
“To the extent that American armed forces are present in Lebanon, it is to support the current Lebanese government, which deserves our assistance,” the statement continued.
But Tlaib defended her resolution in a post on X Thursday ahead of the vote. “The people of Lebanon can’t wait another month for Congress to act,” Tlaib wrote. “Every day that we do nothing, 11 more Lebanese children are killed or injured by the Israeli military in this U.S.-supported invasion. Congress must pass today’s Lebanon War Powers Resolution.”
Tlaib was citing a UNICEF report of data from Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health last month that found 77 children in Lebanon had been killed over the course of a week as Israeli strikes continued to pummel the country.
Some of those who opposed Tlaib’s resolution, including Nadler and Goldman, said they would vote for an alternative version of the resolution that would preserve cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces in their fight against Hezbollah.
The defeat of the resolution came the same day that Hezbollah rejected the latest ceasefire agreement brokered between Israel and Lebanon, as fighting between the Iranian proxy and Israel has intensified in recent weeks.
On Wednesday, the House narrowly passed a resolution for the first time that would limit President Donald Trump’s power to continue the war in Iran. While the development was largely symbolic, it marked a rebuke of the president’s increasingly unpopular strategy in Iran.
On Friday, 85 members of Congress also signed onto a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling on the Trump administration to “use every available diplomatic tool to halt imminent settlement construction in the E-1 area of the West Bank,” a corridor east of Jerusalem.
Citing Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s orders to demolish a Palestinian Bedouin village in the West Bank last month, the letter, which was led by Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish, argued that the issue of settlements in the area had reached a “critical and final inflection point.”
“The window for meaningful diplomatic intervention is closing rapidly, and we believe it is not too late for the United States to act,” read the letter, which was also signed by Nadler and Jewish Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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