What lies behind the abiding conflict between American and Israeli Jews—and what, if anything, can be done about it
By Elliot Kaufman
The Wall Street Journal
September 8, 2019
What had Israel done this time? From 5,700 miles away, the American Jewish Committee said that a new Israeli law “put at risk the commitment of Israel’s founders to build a country that is both Jewish and democratic.” The Union for Reform Judaism was similarly aghast. Nearly every liberal Jewish group in America issued a protest.
“Israelis were befuddled by the brouhaha,” writes Daniel Gordis in “We Stand Divided.” It was July 19, 2018, and the Israeli Knesset had enacted legislation declaring Israel the “national home of the Jewish people,” the state in which the Jewish people alone exercise the right to “national self-determination.” It named Hebrew the official language and “Hatikvah” the national anthem. Most Israelis felt that this “nation-state law” simply repeated what everybody already knew. They were wrong.
The blow-up raised a larger question: Had Israel lost its soul or had American Jews lost their nerve? The prevailing liberal view of such disputes blames the rift between the two Jewish communities on “what Israel does”—mainly, on its treatment of the Palestinians. Mr. Gordis, senior vice president at Shalem College in Jerusalem and a columnist in Israel and America, disagrees. He thinks that there’s little Israel could do to satisfy American Jews because the divide runs too deep, all the way down to “what Israel is.” In his telling, America and Israel are fundamentally different enterprises; the two have opposing missions and values that have engendered an abiding and probably irreconcilable conflict between American and Israeli Jews.
Well before anyone had heard of Benjamin Netanyahu, the relationship between American Jews and Zionism or Israel had been “complex at best and often even openly antagonistic,” Mr. Gordis writes. He cites a series of spats, all predating Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including a 1960 speech in which Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared that American Judaism was “losing all meaning” and predicted its “decline into the abyss of assimilation.” Mr. Gordis uses this history to argue that the two communities’ honeymoon period—he dates it from Israel’s victorious 1967 Six-Day War to its disastrous 1982 Lebanon War—was an aberration. Division has been the norm, driven by essential differences.
In Israel, he writes, the Jews are a majority and a people. They have rejoined history as moral agents and infused the public square with Judaism. In America, where Mr. Gordis was born, the Jews are a minority and a religious denomination. They have escaped from history—finding refuge from tough decisions—and worked to strip the public square of religion.
Most important, for Mr. Gordis, is the dichotomy between Zionist Jewish particularism and American universalism. Zionism’s mission was never to proclaim a principle of liberty for all, he notes, but rather to establish a Jewish state and reinvigorate the Jewish spirit. In Israel, non-Jews may be equal citizens—but of a state that isn’t quite theirs.
Particularist democracy, though common in the free world, can strike Americans as illiberal. Mr. Gordis breezes through the story of America, pausing to focus on the national symbols and the Declaration of Independence, including the absence of “ Jesus ” or “Christ” in its text. He presents America as an idea, “applicable to all men and all times,” in Lincoln’s phrase. It is this universalism, he argues, that makes American Jews uncomfortable with Israel’s devotion to one people—even if it is the Jewish people.
At one time, Mr. Gordis notes, the American Jewish argument for liberal universalism and strict separation of church and state may have been strategic, advanced by a minority group seeking civic equality. Over time, however, it became a core ethical principle, even a sort of identity. But nobody told the Zionists in Israel. To this day, Israelis struggle to grasp the American Jewish allegiance to universal liberal principles, often interpreting American Jews’ criticism of Israel as a kind of disloyalty.
Mr. Gordis labors to avoid taking sides, but he bemoans “Jewish illiteracy” in America, faulting Jews in the U.S. for their tendency to mistake their liberal, universal principles for Judaism and to imagine Israel as a “Hebrew-speaking, falafel-eating version of America.” They “miss the point” of the Jewish state, he says. He pleads for greater understanding: Even if your way is universalism, he tells American Jews, surely there can be one country in the world where Jews have it their way. His tour through Zionist history—showing how the failure of liberal universalism to solve Europe’s “Jewish question” led Zionists to renounce powerlessness and fight for sovereignty—makes a compelling case for tolerance. The Jewish state has its reasons, and American Jews shouldn’t begrudge it the right to walk a different path.
In his conclusion, Mr. Gordis sets out prospective terms of a cold peace. Both sides should temper their resentment and rhetoric, he says, and avoid asking the other to “do the impossible.” This is sensible advice, but American and Israeli Jews can aspire to more than mutual toleration. Gallup’s most recent polling finds that 95% of American Jews have favorable views of Israel. That support has limits, driving Jewish conservatives and Israelis to distraction, but “We Stand Divided” reminds us that it was ever thus.
If Mr. Gordis aims his sights too low, one reason may be that he sees a gulf separating not only American and Israeli Jews but also their nations, America and Israel. “The values and priorities of Zionism are diametrically opposed to many of the values that have made America the extraordinary country it is,” he writes. But perhaps there is a closer affinity than his understanding of America allows, including a more particularistic Judeo-Christian one. As President George W. Bush told the Israeli Knesset in 2008: “The source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty. It is grounded in the shared spirit of our people: the bonds of the Book, the ties of the soul.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: America’s liberal Jews have absolutely no understanding of what it’s like to be surrounded by millions of people sworn to obliterate the state of Israel.
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