In 2024, the meaning of “pro-Israel, pro-peace” is macabre: J Street supports U.S. military aid to Israel as it carries out a genocide. Liberal American Zionism has revealed itself to only be a tool for the subjugation of the Palestinian people.
Ran Greenstein argues that Palestinians will not be able to challenge Israel as an oppressive ethnonational state in the same manner that South Africans did.
In 1948 an Israeli leader assured the U.N. that American Jews would be Israel’s “hostage” to the world to guarantee that Israel behaved itself well. But Israel didn’t behave well, and after failing to change Israel’s conduct, American Jewish organizations soon interpreted their role to mean denying Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights, and labeling all criticism antisemitic. Abba Solomon shares how the mission of American Jewish organizations, once centered on the rights and welfare of Jews in the United States and elsewhere, was affected and — ultimately — distorted by the success of militant Jewish nationalists in Palestine.
Maurice Samuel’s 1924 tract, “You Gentiles,” is cherished by antisemites and Zionists alike because it says that a Jew can never mix successfully in a non-Jewish world because the Jew’s concerns are more serious, and the gentile’s more playful, so the Jew will always be “a source of unhappiness to himself and to those around him.” Samuel’s book insists on the impossibility of Jews and non-Jews living in stability and respect, and thus, the necessity of Jews living in their own land.
Jews are in danger. From what, is the question. Are we as a people (if we exist as a people) a Light unto the Nations, or is our narrative a self-intoxication that every ethnic group indulges in? Abba Solomon asks of Jewish identity in the aftermath of the latest Gaza slaughter.
“Palestinians … have a perfect track record of missing opportunities,” Jared Kushner lectured them on CNN in pushing the annexation plan. “If they screw this up I think they will have a very hard time looking the international community in the face, saying they’re victims, saying they have rights.”
The Jewish “nationhood” proposition being promoted by the Trump regime — in which American Jews are expected to love Israel — is the ultimate endorsement, and thereby the anti-Good Housekeeping seal, to Jewish nationalism. And all this was predicted when Zionism arose in the west.
“We oppose Zionism. We oppose the role that Zionists play in the diaspora,” historian Jack Jacobs explains Bundism at the Yivo Institute in New York, on a breakthrough panel that included Molly Crabapple calling for one democratic state to whoops and applause and Jacob Plitman saying his Zionism was “shattered” after one encounter with Palestinians and learning their story.
When J Street advocates for “Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish homeland,” it is supporting a concept that has been a contradiction-in-terms since Israel’s establishment. Abba Solomon argues that J Street and Bernie Sanders too cannot face the fact that political Zionism means perpetual Jewish domination, or at best custody, of Palestinian lives.
American Jewish organizations cultivated Zionism as a bulwark of Jewish identity and against assimilation, but the success of the indoctrination has created problems for American Jews. “Public antipathy toward Israel would all too likely spill over into hostility toward American Jews,” the American Jewish Committee warned in 1953.