Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Park Avenue synagogue said last week he didn’t want to respond from the pulpit to the Amnesty International report charging Israel with apartheid– and instead let his congregants go to Israel lobby groups AIPAC and the ADL and J Street to read their disavowals of Amnesty — but he couldn’t help himself because he’s committed his synagogue to supporting Israel. So Cosgrove spent 15 minutes trashing a report he admits he hasn’t read, because that’s what you do — “when a family member is attacked from the outside.”
I reviewed the Conservative rabbi’s sermon closely because: Cosgrove is forthright about his commitment to Zionism in a religious setting, as so many rabbis are. So This Is What It Means to Be Jewish for the Jewish Establishment; rabbinical umbrella groups have called on rabbis to denounce the report from their pulpits. Yet Cosgrove is out of step with the only Jewish future. Fully a quarter of American Jews disagree with him; they think Israel is practicing apartheid. Among young Jews, that portion is nearly 40 percent. Jewish intellectuals call for Separation from the “thug nation.”
Cosgrove admits that he has only read the executive summary of the report, but sees that it is the latest in “a decades long drumbeat of anti-Israel sentiment emanating from the halls of the UN and a handful of other human rights NGOs.”
He says he’s “thought long and hard about whether to speak” about the report, which has been out for five days, and doesn’t want to turn the pulpit into political theater. But he overcame his reluctance, because he’s a Zionist. This is an honest ideological confession:
I do so because for me Israel is part and parcel to my Jewish identity, it’s central to my vision of the rabbinate, and as long as I’m the rabbi of Park Avenue, it will remain central to the mission of this synagogue. I want you, your children, your grandchildren… to keep kosher… to create Jewish families… to live proudly as Zionists. None of us chose to live in this miraculous era of a sovereign Jewish state where after thousands of years of exile Jews have the right to national self-determination… For me to be Jewish today means to be actively engaged with Israel. Regardless of whether the claims of Amnesty are new, to fail to address those claims strikes me as an abdication of my role as a Jewish educator.
So– after 1000s of years of exile documented in the bible, people gain political rights to a land from which they ethnically cleanse the indigenous people, and it’s a miracle. (This is called Koolaid.)
Cosgrove hammers the point of the “Jewish people’s claim to the land” and says Amnesty’s questioning of that claim “betrays a bias that colors every other claim it makes. After all if the Jews have no right to the land, then Israel is a national project conceived in sin, its very creation an act of dispossession.”
Cosgrove says he’s also speaking as a father, with children on campus. “We must provide the tools to contend with the Amnesty report and the like… For Zion’s sake, I must not stay silent.” Imho, telling your kids that Jews were exiled from the land 1000s of years ago and that’s why they have special political rights now is not going to be a good tool on campus.
The rabbi is defensive about the new climate of delegitimization of Israel. Apartheid is “clickbait for the feeding frenzy of Israel’s detractors.” The singling out of Israel is antisemitic. The report serves as a “respectable hook” for people who hate Jews.
And here’s the family bit. “For Israel’s defenders, this report has shifted everyone into a defensive posture and thus excuse any of Israel’s actual misdeeds. I have all sorts of criticisms of Israel, its systematic and ongoing restrictions of Palestinian rights, its repeated actions impeding Palestinian sovereignty, most recently the illegal outpost on Evyatar, Israel’s inability to house liberal expressions of Jewish life, most recently the collapse of the Kotel deal. But today I’m not giving full voice to any of those criticisms because well, when a family member is attacked from the outside, that’s not what one does. ”
Cosgrove concludes by saying that the Amnesty report will make peace harder because both sides will just dig in. This is the old argument that Israelis must be hugged to change. But when you hug them, they just evict more Palestinians and dance outside their homes. The news is not good for Zionist rabbis.
“But today I’m not giving full voice to any of those criticisms because well, when a family member is attacked from the outside, that’s not what one does. ”
When a family member is engaging in dangerous and unhealthy behavior, the family gets together and does a group intervention.
Few states have done more destruction than mine. Regime changes, disrespecting others all around the world. A million dead in Iraq. So much needs to change. The question is what can work to accomplish that. Missiles, force… no chance. Public opinion, especially Jewish opinion, will and that is why the Amnesty report is powerful. The sooner the Question of Palestine becomes framed as civil rights and equality, followed by compensations for past injustices, the closer Palestinians will be to freedom, be that in one state or two. And the closer to a world governed by law, not power. Rabbi Cosgrove will likely be in the struggle.
Phil’s last paragraph is a good summary of the problem. The US government and most politicians in this country have been hugging Israel and praising their democracy for decades and unfortunately all it has accomplished is an increase in settlements.
I am always curious about the psychology underlying what looks like obvious hypocrisy. Cosgrove at some level has to know that his brand of liberal Zionism has been nothing but a fig leaf for Israeli apartheid. If the word “ apartheid” bothers his delicate sensibilities he can just replace it with a 200 page account of Israeli human rights violations. Or call it a banana. Anyway, do people like Cosgrove ever secretly admit to themselves that on their own professed terms they have failed utterly? Do they care? I suspect many are happy to have the current situation continue indefinitely into the future. The profession of liberal Zionism in practice is a fig leaf for the occupation for many or most of the people who profess it. Any sincere liberal Zionist would be deeply depressed by the reality and probably would start to wonder if the ideology was a mistake, which is the path Beinart seems to have taken.
“I want you, your children, your grandchildren… to keep kosher… to create Jewish families… to live proudly as Zionists.”
Bull crap!!
Judaism is most certainly a great and admirable monotheistic religion as well as the origin of Christianity and Islam. Zionism, however, is a thoroughly documented racist, fascistic betrayal of Judaism and the instigator of ongoing accelerating monstrous crimes commited against the indigenous Palestinians, including dispossession and expulsion from their homeland in which they have lived continuously for at least 15,000 years. The good news is that at long last, peoples around the world, including more and more enlightened Jews, especially youth, are now comprehending what a horror Zionism is.
“I do so because for me Israel is part and parcel to my Jewish identity, it’s central to my vision of the rabbinate,”
Then he should rethink his “identity” and his vision of the rabbinate. “Identity” is not an excuse for immorality.