In part to mark Israel’s Independence Day on April 21, the former editor of the right-wing outlet Makor Rishon (‘First Source’) wrote a tirade in that paper making the argument that American Jews are traitors to the Zionist cause because they could have come to Israel by the millions, but chose to remain in the “disgrace of their exile of their own will.”
The article is notable because it not only shows the desperation that Zionists are feeling about a looming ‘divorce’ between Israeli and American Jews over Zionism, but also demonstrates why many U.S. Jews’ feelings of attachment to Israel have quickly turned to disgust.
But before getting into the contents of the article, it’s important to share a note about its author. Haggai Segal is a longtime noted journalist in the Israeli media community who also happens to be a convicted terrorist from the Jewish Underground movement. He was personally responsible for bombing Palestinian West Bank mayors in 1980, and his group sought to bomb the Dome of the Rock at the Al-Aqsa compound to make space for a third Jewish temple. Segal was sentenced to five years in prison in 1984, serving only two. In his memoirs written in prison, Segal opined that the bombing of the Dome of the Rock would serve as a “purification.” And in his much later years as chief editor of Makor Rishon, Segal was not shy of allowing incitement to murder, as for example in 2016, when he had a senior former educator suggest that the Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström get the “Bernadotte treatment” (murder), for her “antisemitic DNA” (Wallström was at the time right to suggest, that there may be an Israeli policy of extrajudicial executions, which merited investigation).
Okay, with that context in mind, let’s see what is on Segal’s mind now.
The piece opens with the title: “On the eve of Independence Day: last call to America’s Jewry”. The subtitle: “Israel is soon 80 years old, yet our brothers in USA are still hesitant to come, apart from a handful of Zionist righteous ones. The time has come to tell them clearly what we think about that.”
After nearly 80 years of waiting (from before he was even born), he has lost patience with American Jews:
“How long can one wait? What more needs to happen to you or to us before you pack your suitcases and board the plane?
Perhaps the time has come to deliver an ultimatum: Dear brothers, if you do not make Aliyah [immigration of Jews by ‘Law of Return’] in the masses within five years, until Independence Day 2031, we will stop sending you emissaries and dismantle the [Jewish] Agency.”
That really might not be the threat he thinks it is.
The Jewish Agency, the largest Jewish non-profit organization in the world and whose mission is to promote Jewish immigration to Israel, has not played an incidental role in the alienation of American Jews. Like when its former head, Isaac Herzog (who is now Israel’s President), said in his first day on the job that intermarriage (between Jews and non-Jews) was “an actual plague.” He said it in Hebrew, and instead of apologizing attempted to gaslight everyone by saying he’d said something different in Hebrew, which he didn’t. A year later, Israeli Education Minister Rafi Peretz called such intermarriage “a second Holocaust.”
Back to Segal’s piece, he continues in his rebuke of American Jews:
“The rest of the Jews there are anyway emotionally disconnecting from us with accelerated speed, among else in order to give excuse to the disgrace of their willful exile. Too many are devoting themselves to the antisemitic propaganda.”
He’s absolutely right about the disconnect, which is growing, especially among the younger generations. According to last year’s Economist/YouGov poll, a plurality (43%) of American Jews see Israel’s genocide as such, and among the 18-29-year-olds, it’s at 54%. That’s not because they are stupid – it’s because they have eyes, brains, and hearts.
But now Segal gets personal to specifically incite against Arielle Angel, the outgoing editor of Jewish Currents:
“Some have even reached the nadir of supporting the Hamas invasion of Israeli territory on October 7. Whoever does not believe it, let them read on the Haaretz site, the extensive interview with Arielle Angel, editor of the successful anti-Zionist outlet Jewish Currents.”
That interview with Angel is indeed extensive and also very interesting. Its title is precisely “A Critical Mass of U.S. Jews Is Now Disgusted With Israel”, taken from Angel’s thoughtful analysis, of the same chasm that Segal is apparently seeking to mend, with his ridiculous threats.
The point about October 7, which Segal refers to, comes towards its end. Here are some of Angel’s reflections from that interview:
“What I’m telling you is that it’s hard. The dehumanization of Palestinians that Israelis have enacted and inflicted has affected the way the world sees the full expression of their humanity. It’s not to say that I’m dehumanizing Israelis in turn. I have close relationships with Israelis. But when you’re staring day in and day out into the sun of what’s happening, you understand why something like October 7 happened. You understand it completely, why it happened and how it happened, and this understanding changes the way you relate to the event. It’s not to say that it changes the way you relate to human suffering. When we got the news that Hersh [Goldberg-Polin] and the five other hostages were killed, I just broke down sobbing. But the question of what it means to feel something for this Israeli collective, that’s very complicated right now.”
I think that’s decent. But Segal would have her painted as a terror supporter.
In the interview, Angel describes how the Israeli brutality so many of us have witnessed turned her against Israel, but for Segal, it just means we’ve succumbed to propaganda. He is outraged that American Jews have refused to serve as the demographic asset that they could have been:
“A massive Aliyah by them after the Six-Day War [June 1967] could have enabled the settlement of a million Jews in Judea and Samaria [West Bank], to save Gush Katif [Gaza settlement bloc] and Yamit [Israeli settlement in the occupied Egyptian Sinai]… and of course the Galilee and the Negev”, Segal writes.
In other words, they could have saved Israel’s colonialist expansionist ambitions, both in Palestine and Egypt, and served its demographic ambitions to outnumber Palestinians also inside Israel’s 1949-ceasefire lines, which is often referred to as ‘Israel proper.’ But they didn’t do that, so shame on them.
He summarizes his piece with a demarcation of us-or-them:
“What have they to do with us? What have we to do with them? Judaism is not genetics, it’s first of all an idea, and Eretz Israel [the ‘Land of Israel’] is one of its central pillars, not a scaffolding that can be removed with hope that it will continue to survive. Massive Aliyah in the near future will be an Aliyah of redemption for America’s Jews. Somehow they will survive the rising wave of antisemitism, but their Judaism will not survive without Israel.”
And that is where Segal is definitively wrong in his fanatic Zionism. Segal and his ilk are shouting, threatening, and shaming them because they are losing the battle for Israel and Zionism’s moral legitimacy. The more they shout on behalf of the genocidal apartheid state, the further they sink. So now it’s all the fault of those American Jews.
