Israel’s savage actions in the name of Jews make Jews unsafe

The FBI director said last week that hostilities in the Middle East may well spill over to the United States in attacks on Muslims and Jews, and Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen, who had received a death threat of an antisemitic character, said, “I’m feeling the same as Jews are feeling all around the world — under attack and under threat.”

While we should be skeptical about pro-Israel organizations and individuals conflating antisemitic expressions with anti-Zionist ones, I assume that the FBI director is right, and that some of these incidents are in fact antisemitic. Columbia scholar Rashid Khalidi “readily acknowledged a rash of recent antisemitic incidents on college campuses,” Michelle Goldberg reports in the Times. In one case, a Cornell student has been charged with threatening to attack a kosher dining hall. And I see many Jews online and elsewhere expressing fears and vulnerability, and I would never dismiss such assertions.

It is therefore necessary to state a point I’ve made many times before: Jewish thinkers have long warned that Israel’s dependence on American Jews for political support for actions that many in the world condemn – ethnic cleansing, massacres, and now genocidal actions in Gaza – present a danger to those communities. When American Jewish organizations present wall-to-wall support for such actions, and indeed insist that to be Jewish means to support Israel as “the Jewish state” as it kills civilians, this declaration of unanimity is actually dangerous to Jews.

And so there is a danger in the promotion of antisemitism when Jewish leaders such as Ted Deutch of the American Jewish Committee publish long defenses of Israeli actions in Gaza that repeatedly cite the Hamas attack of October 7 and never even acknowledge Palestinian deaths. That’s right, never even mention what at the time were 9000 killings, including more than 3000 children. Such indifference by an official Jewish leader in the face of massacres by “the Jewish state” will generate resentment of Jews.

“The… killing of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza imperils Jews both in Israel and elsewhere,” the anti-Zionist scholar Yakov Rabkin writes this week. “When Israel claims to be the state of all the Jews it turns them into hostages of its policies and actions. When Jewish community organizations declare ‘We stand with Israel!’ they act as proxies for Israel rather than representatives of Jews.”

Earlier this year I quoted several Jewish thinkers making similar points. Here are excerpts of those statements.

• Ken Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, in July 2021 after an Israeli massacre in Gaza:

“Antisemitism is always wrong, and it long preceded the creation of Israel, but the surge in UK antisemitic incidents during the recent Gaza conflict gives the lie to those who pretend that the Israeli government’s conduct doesn’t affect antisemitism.”

Roth elaborated that it was taboo to make this argument, because it suggests that the Israeli government, which claims to be protecting Jewish people, is actually undermining Jewish safety.

• Hannah Arendt in 1944, anticipating the creation of Israel with the support of American Jews, warned of the dangers of such backing:

“If a Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future–with or without partition–it will be due to the political influence of American Jews….[I]f the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country.” 

• The Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer warned in 1976 that Americans could become “hostile” to American Jews because of their lobbying for Israel.

“American Jews have power only because their fellow citizens are friendly to their exercise of this power. They can become less friendly to this exercise. They can indeed become hostile to it…. American Jews unabashedly lobby for pro-Israel measures with Congress, and make it politically uncomfortable to be against Israel and even take an ‘evenhanded’ position. The political figure who does will be subject to much pressure and name-calling, some of it quite unfair. But as I have said, power must be seen in context. The context has been that it is safe for American Jews to do what they do.”

Glazer’s advice was that American Jewish community should lobby for the creation of a Palestinian state– advice the community rejected.

• The writer Eric Alterman has repeatedly warned that support for Israel has “hollowed out” Jewish life in the U.S. And he said it has contributed to antisemitism. He told Americans for Peace Now in Nov. 2022):

“To be honest while there is an upsurge of antisemitism in the United States– a great deal of which by the way is attributable to people who are angry with Israel– there’s really no problem with being Jewish in America the way there once was.”

• The British Jewish Middle East expert Tony Klug warned in an address to J Street in 2015 that Israel’s dependence on American Jews to defend the indefensible would contribute to “sinister” outcomes, and an “upsurge in antisemitism,” possibly making life “precarious” for Jews.

“If Israel does not end the occupation sharply, and if organized Jewish opinion in other countries appears openly to back it, there will indeed almost certainly be a further surge in anti-Jewish sentiment, potentially unleashing more sinister impulses…. This is not of course to justify such dismal future developments…I fear… that Israel’s neverending occupation of the land and lives of another people is not just seriously endangering Israel, not to mention deepening the despair of the Palestinians. But it is also making the situation of the Jews around the world increasingly precarious.”

This problem is inherent in Zionism.  Its Jewish settlers were dependent on western support, chiefly from the leading powers (Britain, then the U.S.) and so the Jewish communities in those countries were called on to exert their influence on western governments in support of Israel. In fact, many English Jews ran away from Herzl in 1900 because they felt his advocacy for a Jewish state was undermining their position in Britain.  

One longstanding source of Jewish anti-Zionism was the preference for life in diverse societies in which all people’s rights are respected. Zionism has corrupted those principles. It established an ethnocracy that was dependent on the political influence of Jews in the west.

There are many good reasons to be an anti-Zionist today. You care about Palestinian life as much as you care about others. You oppose apartheid and ethnic cleansing and the bombing of hospitals and refugee camps. But another reason is that Zionism is a danger to Jews in the west– when Israel’s brutality is exposed to the world as it is today.

I worry about the future of Jewish life. I don’t see how a Judaism that supports genocide can survive spiritually. There needs to be a crisis inside that community over that stance.

Today Zionism’s “emotional stranglehold” over the Jewish community is breaking, Rabkin says, as young Jews around the world condemn Zionism.

It is more important than ever today that Jewish anti-Zionism flourishes. Most importantly, for the sake of people being massacred by Israel night after night. And also for the sake of Jewish safety here.