The skies over Gaza and the State of Israel are quiet. At 2:00 am local time Friday, Hamas and the government of the State of Israel agreed to a ceasefire. After almost two weeks, there is silence; Israelis can breathe easier without fearing the sirens announcing a new rocket attack, and Gazans can pick up their lives, bury their dead, shift the rubble from the rubble of the four previous wars, and rebuild what they can.
The war is over, at least for now. Both sides – Benyamin Netanyahu’s Israeli caretaker government and the de-facto government of Gaza led by Hamas – claimed victory, as they have done four times before over the last fifteen years. They have returned to the ante bellum status quo, but with a dozen more Israelis and a few hundred more Gazans dead. But nothing has really changed; the people of Gaza will continue to lead lives of desperation amid the ruins, waiting for the next bombs to fall, and Israelis will go on with one ear always cocked to listen for the sound of the sirens announcing a rocket attack.
The leaders of the State of Israel, which asserted the right to defend itself against “aggression,” now claim that the country’s security is assured. But after decades of sputtering war punctuated by periods of relative calm that cannot really be called peace, it is difficult to take such talk seriously. Israelis are no more secure now than they were before the rocket barrage began and, perhaps more ominously, the community of Israel as a whole, Am Yisrael (the people of Israel) of which the State of Israel is a part, is not merely more insecure today, but faces an existential peril that this latest war did not banish. Rather, the IDF’s bombs and the jingoistic ravings of Netanyahu, his supporters, and his surrogates throughout the wider Jewish world have only escalated our danger.
Despite what Israelis might think, or what more-assimilated Diaspora Jews might wish, what happens in the State of Israel affects us all. Shortly after its founding, the philosopher Simon Rawidowicz urged us not to forget that “the State of Israel is not the people of Israel, it is only a part of the people of Israel, only one segment… only one link of many in the chain of Israel, all of whose links have the same weight when seen from the central-general aspect of the people.” Yet, at this moment, it is the heaviest link, and the one whose failure will sunder the chain.
The State of Israel feels like a burden forced upon the people of Israel by history, circumstance, and Zionist arrogance. In its Declaration of Independence, the founders of the State of Israel claimed the “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State” and, in so-doing, interpellated all of Israel into the new country, whether they consented or not. A little less than three years ago, the State of Israel adopted as a Basic Law, the statute that “the State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination.”
Whether or not we welcome it, the State of Israel claims to be our country, and claims to speak for us. As much as many of us might wish it away, and I am not one who does, the State of Israel is a reality with which all of Israel must contend. We inevitably bear consequences of decisions made in Jerusalem by a government we never elected, led by a prime minister a hairs-breadth from a corruption trial.
The State of Israel claims to speak for all Israel so we are often called upon to speak for it. To be a Diaspora Jew in the last few weeks has been to daily confront the grief, horror, and rage of Gentile friends, family, and strangers at the bombing of Gaza. Many of us in the Diaspora shared those feelings – perhaps even most of us – but the strain of watching one part of the House of Israel causing such wanton violence was often too much to bear.
Often, we felt exposed as white nationalists and antisemites tried to leverage legitimate opposition to the illegal occupation, the continued violation of Palestinian human rights, and the bombardment of Gaza, into atavistic hatred of the Jewish other. Mostly, they failed; our Gentile friends and comrades would not fall for the libel. Indeed, they invariably defended us. Yet, windows were broken, and synagogues vandalized; in one social media thread, I read “see? This is exactly why everyone in Europe wanted to be rid of them.”
At the same time, we cannot simply be passive observers to the ongoing tragedy of Gaza and the Palestinian people. In 1948, Rawidowicz greeted the birth of the new Jewish state by observing that our “mothers and fathers always blessed a child: May he grow up to be a Jew, an honest Jew, a good Jew;’ we should also say the same prayer in the State of Israel: ‘May he grow up to be a Jew.’” That the State of Israel has not grown into adulthood as a good Jew, committed to tzedek and chesed, is a concern for all of us who make up the larger family of Am Yisrael. Though the State of Israel is not our country, it is our kin, and we have a responsibility to speak out, to chasten it, and to condemn its sins.
This has been the way since the days of the Prophets. Every single one of them spoke truth to power, and criticized the state, and Israel collectively, when it had gone astray, often at great personal cost. They were shunned, banished, and imprisoned by the kings of Israel and Judah. King Zedekiah had the Prophet Jeremiah thrown into Jerusalem’s cistern to starve to death for the offense of speaking against the sins of the Judean elites.
This is not 600 BCE, nor do we face the Babylonian invasion and exile, yet we should be worried about the position that the leaders of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement, and its surrogates in the Diaspora have put us in. It is not merely the Gaza situation, or the willingness that Netanyahu and his proxies have shown to sacrifice Diaspora Jews for narrow Israeli interests, but an existential question of the State of Israel’s place in the broader Jewish world.
Things are happening quickly now. The State of Israel’s relationship with the United States is becoming increasingly strained. In the last twenty years, the Israeli government has squandered much of the political capital that it had accrued during the 1960s, when it played the part of the tiny, heroic outpost in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was always at least partly theater, but Americans across the political spectrum believed that the hardy sabras in bucket hats were champions of peace and democracy.
That story has become harder to sell after the bulldozers, the settlements, the unending war, and the increasingly eloquent voices advocating for Palestinian self-determination and human rights. Members of the Democratic Party are now willing to reconsider their unquestioning support for the State of Israel. Elizabeth Warren, one of the party’s acknowledged leaders, made that explicit less than a month before the latest war in Gaza began.
The Zionist assault on the Senator was as immediate and fierce as it was inevitable, and Warren did not back down. Indeed, it may only be a matter of time before a Democratic administration cuts the State of Israel loose. This is not an eventuality that I would welcome, but the willingness of the State of Israel to thumb its nose at its most important ally makes it increasingly likely, even inevitable. It soon may no longer be in the interests of the US government to be the State of Israel’s guarantor and ally.
Perhaps more significantly, younger American Jews are growing disinclined to give the State of Israel a pass for what they believe are its violations of international law and Palestinian human rights. Even Habonim Dror, a venerable stalwart of the Labor Zionist youth movement, has begun to soft-pedal the Zionist part. The State of Israel’s policies, as we have seen this month in East Jerusalem and Gaza, are not likely to change that. And hectoring younger Diaspora Jews for being “colonized,” or “self-hating Jews” (one of the most nauseating insults that Zionists fling at their Jewish critics), as so many established Zionists inevitably do, is not going to help matters. When the current generation of Jewish community leaders retire and die, these young people will be Diaspora Israel.
The relationship between the State of Israel and the Diaspora Jewish community is only going to become increasingly fraught. While younger American Jews feel some connection to the State of Israel, it is not the same as their parents’ and grandparents’. For the most part, they do not regard the State of Israel as their homeland, but as the homeland of fellow Jews. So, the traditional Zionist expectation that Diaspora Jews shut up and nod obediently just won’t wash.
Faced with a choice between their political values and commitments to social justice on one hand, and connection to the State of Israel on the other, they will choose the former, as many have already done on picket lines and social media forums demanding peace. It doesn’t matter that many Israelis and Zionists believe that these political values and commitments to social justice are mistaken or ill-informed. Many Diaspora Jews – most of a certain age, if the surveys are reliable – disagree, and they are not going to be convinced by name-calling or rigidly holding an ideological party line.
I wish the State of Israel to be a safe, happy place, and to remain part of Am Yisrael. I consider Israelis to be part of my extended community, and I fervently hope they remain so. But the safety and security of the State of Israel cannot be guaranteed as long as Palestinian human rights and national aspirations are denied. Five wars over fifteen years have not stopped rockets fired at the State of Israel, it is absurd to believe that the next one will, either.
Something has to break, and I believe that will be Am Yisrael. The danger is that Diaspora Israel and the State of Israel might simply go their separate ways. Despite Zionist rhetoric, Diaspora Jews do not need the State of Israel and, as the Zionist movement – whose basic premise of diaspora negation (שלילת הגלות) – has always made clear, Israelis don’t need Diaspora Jews.
Who will defend all Israel?