New Israeli government will finally produce crisis in U.S. Jewish support

The news from Israel is that the job of explaining Israel to America — hasbara, Hebrew for propaganda– just got a lot harder.

That’s because Israel swore in a government filled with messianic rightwing Zionists, two of them convicted criminals, and newly-returned prime minister Netanyahu, himself on trial for taking bribes, declared the new government’s basic principle is, “The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel,” including “Judea and Samaria.” Palestinians– you’re just interlopers here.

Israel’s friends here are struggling with the hasbara job. Stay calm; Netanyahu will control the extremists, some assure us. While Haaretz reports that leading American pro-Israel groups are trying to maintain a business-as-usual approach but are worried about what will shake loose. “Our love and commitment to the Jewish state transcends any one government, any one point in time, and any particular policy or statement,” the Jewish Federations said– in expressing “concerns.” While Israel Policy Forum fretted the extremists in the government will “stress U.S.-Israel relations” and “create rifts with North American Jewry.” Today Americans for Peace Now held a protest at the Israeli embassy.

Sadly, this radical government is sure to hurt a lot of people, but the good news is that it will shake up American Jewry by exposing a terrible truth– tearing off the mask. It is not a departure from Israeli policies, it is a crystallization of them. For decades, Israeli governments have built more Jewish colonies in the West Bank in the name of the “Jewish people,” and killed Palestinians who resist that process (231 this year).

Serious people must acknowledge that the new government’s policies are no departure. Just look at former Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s farewell speech, two days ago, bragging of rightwing achievements in the last year, from refusing to allow the U.S. to reopen a consulate serving Palestinians in Jerusalem, to sending a “record number of Jews… up to the Temple Mount.”

The simple reason the tough Jewish expansionists have been replaced by fascistic Jewish expansionists is that the issue of Palestinian freedom is the most important problem in Israeli society, and no one has ever figured out a good answer, and the problem just gets worse, so Israelis demand more security. Even as its standard of living surpasses Germany, the UK, and France.

Netanyahu was able return to power on the backs of criminals because a shocking number of Israelis including many young Jews found the “nice” Bennett-Lapid government– beloved by the Biden administration as it killed 231 Palestinians– to be too soft on Palestinians. So they voted for the fascistic Religious Zionism party, giving them 14 seats, and banished the leftwing Zionist Meretz party, which lately had six seats, from the parliament.

There’s a clear logic to Israel getting more extremist. Israel is defiantly a Jewish state; and Palestinians will always demand equal rights. Even leftwingers who believe in a Jewish state are doomed to racism. As a Laborite politician (David Ben-Simon) said on i24 News two days ago, “The Palestinians are making life impossible for us.”

Marilyn Neimark explained the logic nine years ago: Israel just keeps getting worse because of its constitution: Jewish hegemony masquerading as democracy.

Maybe it’s better to ask, over these 65 years has Israel been tracing an arc that bends toward justice, speaking of Martin Luther King, of course? If the answer is No, could it be because no matter the potential merits and good will of the founding plan, the effort to establish and sustain the Jewish character of the intended Jewish democracy doomed the democratic character from the start, and it’s been spiraling downward ever since? For whatever the starting point was, I think we mostly agree that Israel has become less democratic in recent years, and every time the separation between religion and state dwindles, free speech  is curtailed, or  minority rights are trampled, it is … in the name of preserving the state’s Jewish character– that is, Jewish hegemony.

Neimark spoke at a progressive panel at an alternative New York synagogue in 2013, in a landmark moment in the American Jewish awakening to what Zionism has done to Israel and what it’s done to American Jews.

Today we’re at another landmark in that process. Israel’s new racist/fascistic government has soured even Tom (“Israel had me at hello”) Friedman. Jeffrey Goldberg is long gone. Eric Alterman is backing away.

Friedman and Goldberg had a serious job. They explained away apartheid and massacres by telling Americans how unreliable Palestinians are and what a bad neighborhood Israel is in. “How do you explain that the most liberal and highly educated group in America — Jews — have supported apartheid?” John Mearsheimer asked me years ago. The lies we told ourselves worked on us because of the inter-generational trauma of the Holocaust. Traumatized by the genocide of a third of our population, Jews justified any action in the name of security. Hitler’s posthumous victory was reducing Jews to one question, Is it good for the Jews? (Norman Mailer’s line).

The new Israeli government is a shock to that system. Its nakedly fascistic politics are a wakeup call to American Jews. We are enabling apartheid. We are the political lifeline for racist zealots in Israel who are going to hurt a lot more Palestinians this year. Supporting them goes against Jewish traditions. Why, J Street even said so last month. And some liberal Zionists are finally endorsing sanctions against ceaseless, illegal Israeli expansionism.

The new Israeli government will bring the U.S. Jewish community to the tipping point, and the project of explaining will fail this year. And American Jews will finally turn on Israel as an apartheid state whose indifference to human rights is actually a danger to Jews everywhere.