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Diaspora alarm over Israel: Your guide to what the critics are saying
(JTA) — I started reporting on North American Jews and Israel in the last century, and for years covered the debate over whether Jews in the Diaspora had a right to criticize the Israeli government in public. The debate sort of petered out in the early-1990s, when Israel itself began talking about a Palestinian state, and when right-wing groups then decided criticizing Israel was a mitzvah.
Nevertheless, while left-wing groups like J Street and T’ruah have long been comfortable criticizing the Israeli government or defending Palestinian rights, many in the centrist “mainstream” — pulpit clergy, leaders of federations and Hillels, average Jews nervous about spoiling a family get-together — have preferred to keep their concerns to themselves. Partly this is tactical: Few rabbis want to alienate any of their members over so divisive a topic, and in the face of an aggressive left, organizational leaders did not want to give fuel to Israel’s ideological enemies. (The glaring exception has been about Israeli policy toward non-Orthodox Judaism, which is seen as very much the Disapora’s business.)
In recent weeks, there has been an emerging literature of what I have come to think of as “reluctant dissent.” What these essays and sermons have in common, despite the different political persuasions of the authors, is a deep concern over Israel’s “democratic character.” They cite judicial reforms that would weaken checks and balances at the top, expansion of Jewish settlements that would make it impossible to separate from the Palestinians, and the Orthodox parties that want to strengthen their hold on religious affairs. As Abe Foxman, who as former director of the Anti-Defamation League rarely criticized Israel, told an interviewer, “If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.”
I read through the various ways Jewish leaders and writers here and in Israel are not just justifying Diaspora Jews who are protesting what is happening in Israel, but providing public permission for others to do the same. Here is what a few of them are saying (with a word from a defender of the government):
‘I didn’t sleep much last night’
Yehuda Kurtzer: Facebook, Feb. 8
Kurtzer is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, the New York-based branch of the Israeli think tank that promotes a diverse, engaged relationship with Israel. In a recent blog post, he neatly describes the dilemma of Diaspora Zionists who aren’t sure what to do with their deep concerns about the direction of the Israel government, especially the concentration of power in a far-right legislative branch.
Centrist American Jews who care about Israel are caught between “those to our right who would see any expression of even uncertainty about Israel’s democratic character as disloyalty, [and] those on the other side who think that a conversation about Israeli democracy is already past its prime,” he writes. He is also concerned about the “widespread disengagement that we can expect among American Jews, what I fear will become the absent majority — those who decide that however the current crisis is resolved, all of this is just ‘not for them.’”
Kurtzer likens Israel to a palace, and Diaspora Jews as “passersby” who live beyond its walls. Nonetheless, he feels responsible for what happens there. “The palace is burning and the best we can do is to tell you,” he writes. “It is also how we will show you we love you, and how much we cherish the palace.”
An open letter to Israel’s friends in North America
Matti Friedman, Yossi Klein Halevi and Daniel Gordis: Times of Israel, Feb. 7
Three high-profile writers who moved to Israel from North America and who often defend Israel against its critics in the United States — Gordis, for one, has written a book arguing that American Jewish liberalism is incompatible with Israel’s “ethnic democracy” — now urge Diaspora Jews to speak out against the current Israeli government. They don’t mention the territories or religious pluralism. Instead, their trigger is the proposed effort to reform the Supreme Court, which they say will “eviscerate the independence of our judiciary and remake the country’s democratic identity.” Such a move will “threaten Israeli-American relations, and it will do grave damage to our relations with you, our sisters and brothers in the Diaspora,” concluding, “We need your voice to help us preserve Israel as a state both Jewish and democratic.”
All Israel Is Responsible for Each Other
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Sermon, Jan. 27
Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of New York City’s Reform Central Synagogue, isn’t looking to Israeli writers for permission to weigh in on Israel’s political scene. In a sermon that takes its name from a rabbinic statement of Jewish interdependence, she asserts without question that Jews everywhere have a stake in the future of Israel and have a right to speak up for “civil society and democracy and religious pluralism and human rights” there. She focuses on the religious parties who are convinced that “Reform Jews are ruining Israel,” as you might expect, but ends the sermon with a call to recognize the rights of all Israeli citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish, “and also those living under Israel’s military control.” Of those Palestinians, she says, “We can’t feel comfortable sitting in the light of sovereignty next to a community living in darkness and expect to have peace.”
And like Kurtzer, she worries that concerned American Jews will simply turn away from Israel in despair or embarrassment, and urges congregants to support the Israeli and American organizations that share their pluralistic vision for Israel.
On That Distant Day
Hillel Halkin: Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2023
In his 1977 book “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic,” the translator and author Hillel Halkin made a distinction similar to Kurtzer’s image of Israel as a palace and the Diaspora as passersby: Jews who don’t emigrate to Israel are dooming themselves to irrelevance, while immigrants like him are living on the stage where the Jewish future would play out. His mournful essay doesn’t address the Diaspora, per se, although it creates a permission structure for Zionists abroad to criticize the government. Halkin sees the new government as a coalition of two types of religious zealots: the haredi Orthodox who want to consolidate their control of religious life (and funding) in Israel, and a “knit-skullcap electorate [that] is hypernationalist and Jewish supremacist in its attitude toward Arabs.” (A knit skullcap is a symbol for what an American might call the “Modern Orthodox.”) Together, these growing and powerful constituents represent “the end of an Israeli consensus about what is and is not permissible in a democracy — and once the rules are no longer agreed on, political chaos is not far away. Israel has never been in such a place before.”
Halkin does talk about Israeli expansion in the West Bank, saying he long favored Jewish settlement in the territories, while believing that the “only feasible solution” would be a two-state solution with Arabs living in the Jewish state and Jews living in the Arab one. Instead, Israel has reached a point where there is “too much recrimination, too much distrust, too much hatred, too much blind conviction, too much disdain for the notion of a shared humanity, for such a solution to be possible… We’re over the cliff and falling, and no one knows how far down the ground is.”
Method to Our Madness: A Response to Hillel Halkin
Ze’ev Maghen: Jewish Review of Books, Jan. 10, 2023
Ze’ev Maghen, chair of the department of Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University, is hardly a dissenter; instead, his response to Halkin helpfully represents the views of those who voted for the current government. Maghen says the new coalition represents a more honest expression of Zionism than those who support a “liberal, democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, individualist, environmentally conscious, economically prosperous, globally connected, etc., etc., society.” The new government he writes, will defend Israel’s “Jewish nationalist raison d’être, and keep at bay those universalist, Western-based notions that are geared by definition to undermine nationalism in all its forms.” As for the Palestinian issue, he writes, “I’d rather have a fierce, hawkish Zionist in the cockpit than a progressive, Westernized wimp for whom this land, and the people who have returned to it after two millennia of incomparable suffering, don’t mean all that much.”
The Tears of Zion
Rabbi Sharon Brous: Sermon, Feb. 4, 2023
Brous, rabbi of the liberal Ikar community in Los Angeles, doesn’t just defend the right of Diaspora Jews to speak out in defense of Israeli democracy and Palestinian rights, but castigates Jewish leaders and communities who have been reluctant to criticize Israel in the past. “No, this government is not an electoral accident, and it is not an anomaly,” she says. “This moment of extremism has been a long time in the making and our silence has made us complicit.”
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Democratic socialists scored big primary wins. But that’s not the whole story.
(JTA) — A string of U.S. House primary successes for democratic socialists, most of whom are sharp Israel critics, was hailed as a major shift in party politics over the course of the summer. But now that the primaries have concluded, a full picture of the results shows that the group’s victories were concentrated in House races in the deepest-blue districts, while few politicians have scored wins in Senate races.
During the primary season, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won seven out of the 25 U.S. House primaries in which they competed, securing two wins in Michigan, one in Colorado, three in New York and one in Pennsylvania, according to the DSA’s vote tracker. However, these wins have all occurred in Democratic strongholds: New York City, Detroit, Denver and Philadelphia.
“It’s a little bit dangerous to overinterpret a handful of elections compared to all the others,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Calling the DSA the new big kid on the block is a little bit premature.”
In addition to the seven DSA primary winners, another DSA candidate who ran in a California nonpartisan primary advanced to a U.S. House runoff against a Democratic incumbent in November. Two additional democratic socialists, from Kansas and New Hampshire, withdrew before their respective House primaries.
Of the DSA’s 18 House primary losses, seven occurred in deep-blue areas – demonstrating that even in the country’s most progressive pockets, democratic socialists often weren’t popular. These defeats notably included one in St. Louis, where incumbent Wesley Bell trounced DSA firebrand and anti-AIPAC crusader Cori Bush.
Granted, the DSA victories are still unprecedented in a country where socialism has long been anathema. The candidates might have only succeeded in deeply Democratic districts – but that means they are all but assured victory on Election Day. Taken together, they’ll constitute a larger contingent in Congress than ever before.
Many of the DSA candidates made Israel and its supporters central issues during their campaigns, and there’s little doubt that their presence will tilt the Democratic caucus in the Congress further away from Israel.
The DSA’s official stance on Israel includes an end to the country’s “colonization and occupation of all Arab lands,” the “self-determination of the Palestinian people” and the cessation of “U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid.” Although the DSA has won fewer races than it has lost, the victories would more than triple the group’s presence in the U.S. House, with five newcomers in addition to Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Democratic Senate staffer, said that supporters of Israel should be concerned by the wins, even if they don’t constitute a wave.
Robbins, who also served as a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under former president Bill Clinton, warned that if anti-Israel DSA politicians keep racking up wins, Democratic strategists will discourage candidates from supporting Israel’s response to Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks.
Recommending any action to the contrary, he argued, will result in “the quickest campaign you’ve ever seen.”
“It will be over before you can say ‘the Golan Heights’,” Robbins quipped.
And yet, although the media spotlight has shone on the DSA’s standout victories, establishment candidates have secured more wins at the ballot box from a numerical perspective. In addition, democratic socialists have focused more on the House than the Senate, where they would need to appeal to broader statewide electorates to win seats.
One major exception to that rule is Florida DSA member Angie Nixon, who pulled off a stunning primary victory in a state that Trump won by about 13 percentage points in 2024. But she didn’t join the DSA until shortly before the election and she didn’t get its endorsement.
Another DSA Senate candidate, Gregory Levy of Ohio, will be running in the November general election as an Independent.
But the three other staunchly progressive Senate candidates who will be on the Democratic ballot in November – in Maine, Michigan and Minnesota – don’t define themselves as democratic socialists. While many are still highly critical of Israel, they have differences with DSA and are more interested in making sure they appeal to the more politically diverse populations they will face statewide. They face close races where swing voters who don’t identify strongly with either party are likely to make the difference.
For instance, though many of Abdul El-Sayed’s positions are similar to DSA policies, last month he told The Wall Street Journal that he is “not technically or practically DSA” and that he doesn’t oppose capitalism. At the same time, he has earned the support of many democratic socialist politicians, including Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Kamarck observed that Michigan, which has a huge Arab-American population, remains the nerve center of the Democratic Party’s pro-Palestinian movement. Yet although polls forecast a landslide victory for El-Sayed, who sharply criticized Israel throughout his primary campaign, she termed his victory in early August as “a squeaker.”
“It was a one-point race,” she said. “What that says is that this is not finished.”
Haile Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in a statement at the time that although her group was disappointed in El-Sayed’s victory, his “razor-thin margin isn’t the resounding win for the far-left that was predicted.”
An Economist model issued shortly after El-Sayed’s victory predicted that the Democratic Party’s chances of winning in November fell to 48% following the primary. But a Marist poll published on Wednesday gave El-Sayed a seven-point lead over Republican Mike Rogers, with a 3.8% margin of error.
Meanwhile, post-primary predictions showed that Minnesota’s Peggy Flanagan would secure an easy victory in her blue state’s Senate race. However, a new KSTP/SurveyUSA poll found that her five-point lead over Republican Michele Tafoya had narrowed to a statistical tie. Like many party progressives, Flanagan has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
As for Maine’s Jackson, the progressive was trailing Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a five-term incumbent, by 3 points, with a 3.1% margin of error, according to an AARP poll released on Thursday.
Nixon in Florida was 11 points behind Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, with a 4% margin of error, a Stetson University from late last month poll found. On the other hand, St. Pete Polls placed the candidates in a dead heat just the week before, giving Moody just a 0.3-point edge, with a 3.2% margin of error.
In a testament to the growing power of the DSA – even in a red state – Moody reportedly told Fox News Radio this week that she is “seeing way-too-close-for comfort polls in many Republican Senate races.”
And in an email blast sent the same day, according to Florida Politics, Moody warned that “the polls have been all over the place.”
“Some have us up. Two have us tied,” she wrote. “We’re in the final stretch, where everything we do, and your support, really matters.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Democratic socialists scored big primary wins. But that’s not the whole story. appeared first on The Forward.
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The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election
There are two ways to look at the Oct. 7 attacks, and which way you do will determine, to a large degree, whether you want to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu survive the next election.
The first view is that Oct. 7 proved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved. The second is that it proved the conflict cannot be allowed to remain unresolved.
These conclusions point in almost opposite directions, yet both begin with something Israelis learned, or thought they learned, from the same horrific day. One says there is no point trying to mollify the Palestinians, because hatred of Israel runs too deep. The other says that leaving millions of Palestinians indefinitely in their current condition will produce catastrophe again and again. The tragedy is that Oct. 7 supplied powerful evidence for both.
The first view is not without foundation. Even to Israelis (and people across the world) who have long sought a peaceful accommodation, it was shocking to see the sheer joy of the Hamas terrorists as they butchered families while filming their own barbarism, calling parents to brag, then dragging innocents into Gaza where crowds wildly cheered.
But the real shock was the support for this in the West Bank and Gaza – polls showed two-thirds to three-quarters of Palestinians approved – suggesting coexistence is impossible. Rarely have polls been more devastating. As a result, many Israelis lost sympathy for Palestinians and concluded that a cleansing inferno is required. The brutal war that followed certainly reflected that.
The second way to see Oct. 7 is that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored – that the situation of the Palestinians was so unacceptable that something terrible was bound to happen. Many Israelis have trouble accepting this, because it does not really explain Hamas, which would fight Israel in any case, even if it were led by a far-left government willing to hand over to it every inch of the West Bank and Gaza and divide Jerusalem. But it might explain why so many Palestinians – even ones not in denial about the facts – were prepared to support it.
This view also offers at least one reason why the propaganda war waged by Hamas and its supporters has been so successful. There are others – including antisemitism and an outright denial of Israel’s right to exist . But the fundamentally unacceptable situation of the Palestinians is a big one, to be sure.
The combination of these factors yielded stunning results and contributed to an unfair vilification of the country that continues to frustrate Israeli voters.
By Oct. 9, before Israel had even identified all its dead or invaded Gaza, accusations of “genocide” were already circulating online, then among activists, NGOs, academics and eventually governments. By Oct. 13, protests denouncing “genocide” took place in London. On Oct 17, the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies held a symposium called “The War on Gaza: Palestinian Defiance and Resistance against Orchestrated Genocide and Expulsion.”
Within weeks, South Africa accused Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, invoking the “crime of crimes,” a term most associated with the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Rwanda. “This libel is powered by a relentless campaign of indictment that engraves a lie into collective memory,” says Adam Fisher, one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, who has researched the propaganda campaign in detail.
When Israel’s military entered Gaza, it faced an enemy that had deliberately embedded weapons caches, command centers and rocket launchers in homes and crowded neighborhoods, including hospitals, schools, mosques and UN sites. Hamas fighters vanished into tunnels beneath civilian areas, turning every dead child, collapsed building and grieving parent into material for a global indictment of Israel on social media. The strategy was clear: maximize civilian suffering, isolate Israel internationally, weaken American Jewish support and ultimately erode U.S. backing.
The implication is that Oct. 7 was a response to Palestinian suffering. The suffering is real, but Hamas was never defending Palestinians. The Iran-backed jihadist group has long sought to destroy Israel rather than establish a Palestinian state, and its campaign of terrorism after the 1993 Oslo Accords helped destroy the peace process by driving Israelis to the right.
Still, none of this makes the pre-Oct. 7 reality acceptable. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians live alongside some 500,000 Jewish settlers without equal rights, largely under military occupation, while extremist settlers have increasingly engaged in violence with the government and military often looking the other way. In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians endured a devastating Israeli-Egyptian blockade because Hamas ruled the Strip. It failed to prevent Hamas from arming itself while making civilian life miserable.
On Al Jazeera recently I was placed opposite a young Gazan named Ahmed Abo Askar, introduced as a humanitarian activist and engineering student. He said he had gone three days without eating, and looked like it. He hoped an aid flotilla might get through and then smuggle out his ailing father.
I tried to put things in perspective, explaining about Hamas and the need to be rid of it. Ahmed answered emotionally: “Israel, not Hamas, they are the ones who killed my sister, killed their children and their entire family on 6 November 2023. Not all of Palestinian people are Hamas. The goods, why it’s not entering? ‘It’s because of Hamas.’ We are not Hamas. We are human in the end.”
Everything I said was true – but he won the argument anyway, because he was a decent person suffering. No history lesson trumps that.
The insane situation has traumatized Palestinians and Israelis in parallel ways. The Palestinians – who are rooted in a conservative society disinclined to compromise – have been made, in large numbers, desperate enough to support a nihilistic movement like Hamas, which is truly genocidal against Jews.
As for Israelis, it has made huge numbers of them stop wanting to think seriously about Palestinians except through the lens of security and punishment. Some openly fantasize about expulsion. Empathy is viewed as naïve. Oct. 7 made Israelis a little crazy too – exactly per the plan of Hamas.
So the Israeli opposition — people deeply hostile to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition — is mostly afraid to touch the Palestinian issue at all in the campaign ahead of the Oct. 27 election, preferring to focus on Netanyahu’s epic domestic failures. Politically, the calculation is correct.
That is where the two interpretations of Oct. 7 attach themselves to the choice Israelis face in this election. Netanyahu has spent much of his career arguing, in practice if not always explicitly, that the Palestinian problem can be managed rather than solved: Contain Gaza, maintain Israeli control of the West Bank, expand settlements, periodically use overwhelming force and resist international pressure for Palestinian statehood.
If the lesson of Oct. 7 is that Palestinian hostility is essentially immutable and territorial compromise merely brings the enemy closer, then Netanyahu’s basic worldview survives despite his catastrophic failure on Oct. 7. The answer is deterrence and permanent Israeli security control — not another attempt at political reconciliation.
Gadi Eisenkot, the main challenger on the center-left, is more complicated. He is hardly offering Israelis a new Oslo: He has explicitly rejected a Palestinian state in the near- or medium-term and says the old two-state formula is unrealistic after Oct. 7. But he has also opposed more West Bank settlements and other measures that would make eventual territorial separation impossible.And he has long warned against Israel sliding into a binational state.
The implication is less a peace plan than a direction: Preserve the possibility of separating Israelis and Palestinians, change the conditions that perpetuate the conflict, and leave open a political horizon even if nobody can presently say exactly when it nears and how it ends. In that sense, the choice is not between Netanyahu and a dove. It is between continuing to manage an apparently permanent conflict and a government that might at least begin trying to move toward a possible peace.
But if Israelis conclude that Palestinians only understand force – which, by the way, Hamas clearly doesn’t – we’re guaranteeing a death spiral. Such a problem left to fester, without any attempt to change the dynamic, will blow up again and again. So after the election, if Netanyahu and his destructive right wing coalition are mercifully gone, this will need to be addressed in new and creative ways.
Both views of Oct. 7 rest on a foundation of facts. The invasion and massacre – and the widespread support for it among Palestinians – simultaneously dismantled both the Israeli left’s confidence in Palestinian intentions, and the Israeli right’s belief that the Palestinian problem could be indefinitely managed.
But it also proved that distrust is not a policy. Israel can build fences, destroy armies, assassinate commanders and punish those who attack it. What it cannot do is make millions of Palestinians disappear. If there is no political answer to that reality, eventually there will be another violent one.
The post The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election appeared first on The Forward.
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Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium
(JTA) — Zach Bryan, one of the world’s most popular country artists, appeared onstage wearing a shirt that read “Free Palestine” on Saturday night at Gillette Stadium outside Boston.
The venue was at the center of the dispute between stadium owner Robert Kraft and rapper Macklemore, who was blocked from performing there after Kraft objected to statements and imagery from an earlier stop on the tour and a “broader history” that Kraft characterized as antisemitic.
Representatives for Bryan and Kraft did not respond to requests for comment.
Bryan, whose biggest hits include “Something in the Orange” and his Kacey Musgraves duet, “I Remember Everything,” broke a stadium attendance record with 73,538 people on hand, the stadium said in an X post.
Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, helped lead an effort by stadium owners to block Macklemore from performing at their venues as Ed Sheeran’s opening act. Sheeran tried to distance himself from the venue owners’ actions, but his backup band and other acts subsequently withdrew from the tour.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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