Dennis Ross worked for President Obama on Middle East policy (and for a number of other presidents). He was in the administration because he is beloved by Israel supporters. Now Ross is co-chair of the board of the Jewish People Policy Institute, a Zionist organization based in Jerusalem and founded by the Jewish Agency.
The Times of Israel reports that JPPI has “composed a plan to facilitate immigration” of a quarter of all French Jews to Israel in the next five years.
The plan by the Jewish Agency-affiliated think tank would prepare for up to 120,000 French Jews to arrive in Israel during the coming four years. The plan cited a rise in jihadist terror attacks and a difficult economy in Europe as causes of increased immigration.
But when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu called on French Jews to leave France earlier this month, there was anger from the Jewish leadership throughout Europe. French Jews at a synagogue Netanyahu visited in Paris broke into La Marseillaise after he spoke, in a declaration of their patriotism and a rebuke to the idea of leaving France. Yes, many French Jews worry about anti-Semitism, but the leadership doesn’t think leaving is the answer– this group of Orthodox rabbis, for instance.
The call to leave France from Dennis Ross’s thinktank gets at a deeper philosophical disagreement between hard-core Israel supporters and western liberals. Ross’s thinktank appears to be in opposition to the Obama administration on the issue of Jewish integration and assimilation into American society.
JPPI has long opposed Jewish assimilation and intermarriage. This report last year, whose foreword is written by Ross (and former Carter official Stuart Eizenstat), repeatedly refers to assimilation as something that hurts the Jewish community. It calls for “the kind of authentic indigenous vision of Jewish life needed to build recognizable communities and to cultivate levels of Jewish identity necessary to stem assimilation and sustain Aliyah [immigration to Israel].” Ross calls for “full-time Jewish Day School education” for young Jews — indicating that this will stop them from marrying non-Jews.
But at President Obama’s press conference with British PM David Cameron ten days ago, Obama explicitly called for “assimilation” of minority communities:
Our biggest advantage, Major [Garrett], is that our Muslim populations, they feel themselves to be Americans. And there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition that is probably our greatest strength. Now, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t subject to the kinds of tragedies that we saw at the Boston Marathon. But that, I think, has been helpful.
Cameron echoed Obama, and used the word integration:
I very much agree with what Barack says about the importance of building strong and integrated societies. I made a speech about this at Munich a couple of years ago, saying that it had been a mistake in the past when some countries had treated different groups and different religious groups as sort of separate blocks rather than trying to build a strong, common home together. That is what we should be doing, and that is what our policy is directed to.
And, of course, you need to have — as I believe we are — a multiracial, multiethnic society of huge opportunity where in one generation or two generations you can come to our country and you can be in the Cabinet; you can serve at the highest level in the armed forces; you can sit on the bench as a judge. I’ve got in my Cabinet someone just like that, who in two generations his family has gone from arriving in Britain to sitting — that’s vitally important, as is combatting unemployment, combatting poverty.
This would seem to be the way now in western societies, seeking to create diverse, multicultural leaderships.
Opposition to assimilation issue is a central premise of Zionism. Assimilation doesn’t work, they say: Jews will never be safe in western societies. In “The Existential Necessity of Zionism After Paris,” Commentary says that French Jews need Israel because their survival in Europe is in question. Israel saved millions before, it is needed to do so again now that Muslims are all over Europe, Commentary indicates in this piece.
France’s Jews are outnumbered by its Muslims 10 to 1…
Muslim attacks on French Jews increased more significantly still in the summer of 2014, during and after Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza…
Jews should have the right to choose to stay in France or anywhere else on the planet Earth they wish to live, from the center of Hebron to the top of Mount Everest. But the issue is not right but reality. Jews in France—and, given certain trends, elsewhere in Europe, from Great Britain to Scandinavia—have to consider their literal survival…
[Israel’s] existence before the Holocaust would have saved millions. Its existence after the Holocaust saved and created millions. Seventy years after the Holocaust, Jews in Europe are in need of it again.
During LBJ’s time and Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, it was revealed that many in the WH were pro Israeli zionists, who spied on LBJ, and reported everything that happened in the WH, back to Tel Aviv, and I am disappointed that Obama had, and most probably still does have, Israeli agents, whose first loyalty is to Israel, and not the President and country, surround him in the WH. Our nation and the highest offices in this country seems to be infested with these traitors, whose first love and devotion, is not to the US, but to an alien apartheid nation.
While Middle East Jews are outnumbered by Muslims 50 to 1: great calculus here.
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Speaking of survival and realistic steps to ensure it, how many upper-class Israeli having concluded that Israel’s self-inflicted collapse is a foregone conclusion and that they therefore need a well organized exit strategy are getting european passports these days?
120,000 French Jews for Israel? Piece of cake; all Israel has to do is place a couple of small bombs in Jewish quarters of Paris and in no time, Israel will have its 120,000 French Jews.
Been done before, in Baghdad in early 50s, Also in Beirut when the Magen Avraham Synagogue was bombed by the Israeli navy on August 12, 1982. Very convincing.
You’re greatly distorting Ross’s argument.
There is a difference between the assimilation President Obama calls for and the argument against complete assimilation that Dennis Ross makes on behalf of JPPI. People need not abandon their identity, as many assimilated Jews have by learning nothing about their faith, intermarrying, and then raising their children with none of their heritage, or raising their children in other faiths (and yes, in most intermarriages between Christians and Jews where a religion dominates, it’s Christianity, not Judaism). That is the kind of assimilation Ross is talking about. President Obama is talking about a very basic kind of assimilation that pertains principally to new immigrant populations. The vast majority of American Jewish community, with the possible of the ultra-orthodox, have certainly assimilated to that extent. In my view, America is a far less rich place when assimilation means subsuming your cultural and religious identity into some secular melting pot, rather than incorporating it into a diverse fabric. You seem to favor a completely false choice between a very secular form of assimilation, and a religious separateness, when the truth is that the great thing about America is that it is possible to be both religious and assimilated at the same time. You throw around words like Day School like they’re implicitly bad; do you have an idea what Day School is and what Ross means? Or are you depending on people here to do the Annie Hall and imagine that day school students are all kids with peyes who dress in black suits and hats every day, instead of what Ross actually means, which is community day schools with dual curriculums that include high-quality private school academic educations and regular Jewish studies, where a high percentage of graduates go on to elite universities?
And yes, when you belong to a religion of 15 million people worldwide, as opposed to one with 1.5 billion followers, and when your faith is practiced by 1.7% of a country’s population, rather than 78.5% of the population, intermarriage is something you worry about a lot more than you otherwise would. It would be different if intermarriage was an exercise in sharing cultural traditions. But most often, it’s the end result of an upbringing that is devoid of any real Jewish content.
It’s breath-taking to see supremacism – in this case, Jewish supremacism (in a supremacist “Jewish State”) – advocated so overtly and self-righteously.
It’s disappointing to see so many people / organizations / governments enabling and defending it.