Official Jewish blinders to genocide are a danger to Jews

I’ve been visiting my mother in the Philadelphia suburbs, so I’ve been inundated by pro-Israel propaganda. Walking the streets I see many posters about Israeli hostages and standing with Israel. Like these outside the Mainline Reform Temple in Wynnewood (below), or the poster at a private house in Bala Cynwyd (above), sounding the Israeli battle cry, “Together We Shall Win.”

My mother’s mailbox is also flooded with the official Jewish community’s rallying cries for Israel.

The latest Hadassah magazine contains many articles about the trauma of October 7, and an interview saying that Students for Justice in Palestine and appeals for BDS should be banned. The Jewish Exponent says that Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow are antisemitic for opposing Israeli apartheid. While the American Jewish Committee letters focus entirely on October 7 and the “evils of Hamas and Hezbollah” —and supposed spiraling antisemitism since then – but nothing about the famine in Gaza and tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

Just like the Mainline Reform Temple asking congregants to send money to Israeli families — with no mention of the suffering of Gaza families.

As a Jew I find this extremely concerning. The organized Jewish community is doing its best to deny what strong majorities of Democrats and Independents believe: there is a genocide in Gaza, and U.S. aid should be conditioned.

These Jewish groups spotlight the Hamas atrocities of October 7 as the cause of all the violence. That is the message of the October 7 Project funded by the five biggest Jewish organizations: World attention must be focused on the massacre of October 7. The unending massacre since then – well that is all on Hamas’s head.

This sort of dehumanization of Palestinians by the leading Jewish groups is glaring and inexcusable. By contrast, consider the messages of rebel groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. They have never denied the October 7 violence by Hamas, have called for a ceasefire, and have used the word genocide to describe Israeli attacks on Gaza– and the word apartheid to describe the causes of October 7.

But the organized Jewish community has ostracized those groups, as it seeks to impose unanimity. The head of the Jewish Federations explains (in my mother’s Jewish Exponent) that the response of the Philadelphia Jewish community since October 7 has been “amazing unprecedented…a community coming together.”

The refusal by the largest Jewish communal groups to acknowledge Palestinian suffering gives Jews a bad name. It stands in opposition to the idealistic college students who are demanding divestment by their universities from bombs that kill babies. It stands in opposition to global opinion. And reality itself. “There’s a war of public opinion. And you’re losing that war… I’m telling you,” Lesley Stahl of CBS News told an Israeli government spokesman on 60 Minutes (in a valentine piece to Israel).

But why aren’t Jewish journalists putting the leading Jewish groups on the spot for denying genocide and famine? This sort of racism is unacceptable in any other context we can imagine in the U.S. But the leading Jewish groups are never held to account, except by JVP and IfNotNow. And the Jewish press regularly carries the worst stereotypes of Palestinians. “Most Americans…rightly regard the Palestinian cause as one inextricably tied to Islamist terror,” Jonathan Tobin of the Jewish News Syndicate writes, in classic Nakba denial.

Meantime, there is reportedly an upsurge in antisemitism. I don’t doubt that this is the case. But how much of this antisemitism is rage at American Jewish organizations for blindly supporting Israel’s savagery? That Jewish Exponent spotlighted a vandalism at a synagogue near my mother’s house. On March 24, a swastika was spray-painted on a sign outside Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El that says Our Community Stands With Israel. That’s obvious antisemitism. But it is directed at blind support for Israel.

Antisemitism that is generated by American Jewish support for Israel has been a regular theme for me. I have quoted fears about such reaction, from Hannah Arendt and Ken Roth and Nathan Glazer. Tony Klug warned about this at J Street years ago; Israel’s conduct will make life “precarious” for Jews elsewhere.

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.

Today the biggest American Jewish groups are stoking anti-Jewish feeling by their own demonstration of anti-Palestinian bigotry: ignoring the famine and massacres of civilians in Gaza that have horrified the world and have led so many to accuse Israel of genocide.

The media should be publicizing the racist indifference of the U.S. establishment to Palestinian suffering, from Democrats and Republicans alike. And they should be quizzing Jewish institutions about their support for Israeli actions. Lately David Remnick on the New Yorker Radio hour (May 3) criticized Harvard’s Palestinian Solidarity Committee statement of last October that placed the blame for the violence of Oct. 7 entirely on Israel for its occupation policies – and that was signed by many left-wing Harvard groups. “As a Jew,” Remnick said, he sensed antisemitism, an accusation he said he rarely makes. I don’t think the PSC statement was antisemitic, though I am critical of it, for denying agency to Palestinian actors.

But my question is why Jewish journalists are not calling out the major Jewish organizations for their blaming of all the violence since October 7 on Hamas, when Israel plainly bears the blame? These organizations have way more power than the left-wing groups at Harvard. They go in and out of the White House all the time, Ben Rhodes once told us.

As Jews, we have some responsibility for these organizations. My own mother has supported them; and a lot of my work has been to counter fervent Zionism in my own community. It is more important than ever to support the work of JVP and IfNotNow and call out the Jewish establishment for its cheerleading of civilian massacres.