The Jewish establishment’s blindness to Palestinian slaughter also hurts U.S. Jews

Jodi Rudoren of the Jewish Forward newspaper spent days reporting in Israel recently, and on December 20, Brian Lehrer of WNYC radio asked her what Israelis think of the death toll in Gaza, which Lehrer said is “unprecedented anywhere on earth in this century in this short a time.”

The Israelis don’t care, Rudoren said. “It’s really not an active debate in Israel, among Jews anyway.” They are mourning and fearful, she said– then went on to rationalize the 20,000 killed. The death toll “is totally staggering and hard to grapple with… [but] we do need to keep in mind, that the international laws of war are not based on what the total death toll is, they’re based on the proportionality of  civilian casualties and the collateral damage of each targeted attack, and it takes a long time to figure that out….in the fog of war.”

And therefore, “it’s on the international community to pressure the Palestinians and the Arab world to provide some [diplomatic] alternatives that might work for Israel right now.”

Rudoren’s mental gymnastics in favor of Israel are hardly unique. All across the U.S., Jewish establishment groups and individuals are lobbying for Israel, and if they mention the slaughter of Palestinian civilians, they blame Hamas.  

William Daroff, the head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, issued a statement calling for Jewish unity in the face of international protests of Israel and never mentioned Palestinians at all. There has been an “astonishing and alarming rise in antisemitism… in response to Israeli governmental action–” Action? Israel has killed more civilians in two months than have been killed in the Ukraine war in almost two years. But Daroff saw a battle for Jewish survival.  

“The entire Jewish nation is at war,” he says. “Collective determination is also how I know we will overcome these challenges and win… As a people, we are stronger when we are one.”

Liberal Zionists have heeded this call. For instance, the New Israel Fund blames Hamas for “spawning the war that has claimed thousands of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of individuals.” Thus leaving Israel’s crimes out of it.   

That approach is little different from the approach of the five big center-right Jewish organizations (the Jewish Federations, the American Jewish Committee, the ADL, AIPAC, and the Conference of Presidents) that lately launched a media campaign called the Ten-Seven project aimed at keeping the American media and government’s focus on the Hamas atrocities of October 7 and ignoring the slaughter of Palestinians and destruction of Gaza.  

The Conference of Presidents ran a full page ad in the New York Times saying this war is all about antisemitism. “Hatred of Israel is Endangering American Jews.”  The ad equates anti-Zionism and antisemitism. “Disagreement with or contempt for Israel has become a pretext to attack Jews,” the ad says.

Lehrer echoed these fears when he interviewed Rudoren. “History suggests that anywhere Jews have lived as a minority they have been oppressed.”

It is understandable why Jews have such feelings historically, but they are surely inappropriate to a moment when more than 8,200 Palestinian children have been killed. I say that the relentless focus on Jewish suffering poses a greater risk to Jewish life than antisemitism. Fresh images of maimed Palestinian children are on the news every night, and famine and disease are on the doorstep — and the Jewish establishment is fixed entirely on the atrocities against Jews of 12 weeks ago.

The world clearly sees Hamas’s crimes, but it also sees the horrifying scenes from Gaza, which never stop. Almost every nation has called for a ceasefire except the United States, and BBC commentators regularly describe conditions in Gaza as apocalyptic.

The polling indicates that the young and the Democratic base are shocked and distressed by Israel’s actions—but their feelings are unrepresented by our politicians. This awning at a bodega in Brooklyn is a perfect expression of general attitudes in the progressive U.S. community. And P.S., the awning doesn’t blame Jews.

The Jewish leaders want us to believe that only a lunatic fringe cares and America is with us. The Ten Seven project insists on this. But they are wrong. About half the American public is against the Israeli genocide. A startling 46 percent of the U.S. public opposes U.S. military aid to Israel, 45 percent support it, according to a Quinnipiac poll. Among the young the numbers are sharply tilted against military aid — 72 percent of those under 35, 53 percent of those under 50. We can safely assume that the Democratic numbers are at least 60/40 against, based on earlier surveys.

The Israel lobby is fighting these attitudes with wealth, and that is feeding the worst stereotypes about Jewish influence. It is reported that AIPAC is planning to spend upward of $100 million to try to defeat members of the Squad, the only people in Congress who have challenged Israel’s actions.

Daroff brags that a “coterie of philanthropists” is funding the Ten Seven project to influence media. That coterie surely has Joe Biden’s ear. The ADL, the AJC, the Conference, and AIPAC have all met with the White House, Daroff  says. (Just as Obama’s top foreign policy aide had to meet with officials of big Israel lobby organizations more than all other interest groups put together and had to call a list of “leading Jewish donors” in 2011 after Obama dared to suggest a two-state solution must be on the ‘67 lines and Netanyahu lectured him for seven minutes in the White House). 

Israel’s crisis has only made the role of donors in the American establishment more naked. Big Jewish donors have been directing U.S. institutions on how to respond to Israel’s crisis. Harvey Swieca at Columbia’s business school threatened to withdraw funds — and the school suspended JVP and SJP for supposedly making Jews feel unsafe with pro-Palestinian rhetoric. A major Penn donor, Marc Rowan, played a central role in the resignations of the university president and the board chair over campus culture– and now faculty at the school is in an uproar over why Rowan (a financial wizard mentored by Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, of Jeffrey Epstein fame), is issuing mandates about the correct “culture” in campus debates. And, just as shocking, the new chair of Penn’s board is the leader of the Jewish Federations.

The top bosses at CNN and MSNBC, as I have stated many times, are Jews who support Israel. It is hardly a coincidence that CNN anchors insist on an October 7 frame – as opposed to an apartheid frame, or Israel’s siege of Gaza frame – and that Virginia Moseley oversees editorial operations and she’s married to Tom Nides, who has thrown himself into work for the Jewish Federations, which is part of the Ten Seven project.

Liberal institutions are also affected. When authors at the National Book Awards ceremony last month issued calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, it was too much for leading sponsors.  A major Jewish donor, Zibby Owens, withdrew her sponsorship of the presentation because she said there would be “antisemitic” speeches at the event. Owens’s father, Steve Schwarzman, funds the institution where I wasted my youth, the New York Public Library research building

I see this and am ashamed. The official Jewish community is seeking to outlaw robust debate by declaring that only antisemites would speak up for the millions of helpless Palestinians under a historic onslaught.

That stance destroys Jewish traditions. Jews on the left played a key political role in the liberation movements in the U.S. in the last century and in the anti-Vietnam war movement, and in the last 30 years we have gained unprecedented levels of privilege and influence in the U.S. establishment.

And what role do we imagine for ourselves springing from this power?

To demand that a Long Island Santa Claus be fired by the chamber of commerce for asking tough questions of the American Jewish Committee proxies for Israel at a local temple? Are you crazy? To knock out school board officials in suburban Philadelphia because they denounce Israeli “genocide” or say it’s a terrorist state? Don’t they have that right?  

The commandment of supporting Israel has sent my community into complete intellectual freefall. A community that prided itself on Talmudic reasoning and for having three opinions for every two Jews is enforcing one opinion on the U.S. discourse, then claiming that the resulting conformity is actually U.S. public opinion.

How does this end well for Jews? This conduct fulfills the very worst stereotypes of Jews wielding influence, and other Americans are seeing it. The polling says that 67 percent of Americans under 25 believe that Jews are an oppressor class, not a victimized class– and 44 percent of those 25-34 believe the same. Overall, Americans don’t accept these ideas, by three to one. But I find those attitudes concerning. They should be a warning to the entitled Jewish organizations to stop throwing their weight around and ignoring Palestinian genocide. Even J Street is in that gang. (And so is Bernie Sanders, a man I revered but who has failed the simple Ceasefire test – because of your days on the kibbutz, Bernie?)

When Israel started bombing refugee camps, an old friend who has always worked and socialized with Jews wrote to me in anger. Not only was Israel exterminating people and possibly costing Biden Michigan and inspiring more kids to become terrorists—it was “reigniting latent antisemitism that mind virus that survives from Roman times…”

The official Jewish community’s indifference to genocide is not only hurting Palestinians but will hurt Jews. “The entire Jewish nation” is not at war. Israel is. A Zionist society that has totally lost its bearings out of a psychosis bred by Holocaust thinking and political impunity is at war with an impoverished people it has oppressed for generations.

Let us celebrate all the young Jews who recognize these truths and have bravely called for ceasefire. They are the only future for the American Jewish community.

As it is, Israel’s racism against Palestinians has subsumed official Jewish life. American Jews have abandoned their best traditions out of deference to a militant state that exists in constant fear of those it subjugates. Israel will only be curbed when American Jews recognize that their own experience of a modern polity – an inclusive society based on equal rights for all and the expansion of civil rights – is the true model.