April 9, 2020 41
While it remains true, then, that the
more left-leaning and secular members
of the American Jewish community
are less devoted to Israel than they
once were, the shift is probably more
drift than rift. Their children are sim-
ply turning their attention elsewhere.
At the same time, Israel needs their de-
votion less. Christian evangelicals are
fiercely attached to it and committed to
protecting it politically. The rejection
of Israel by the left is helping to nudge
organized Jewry to the center and
right, leaving liberal Zionists in groups
like J Street in the challenging position
of spurning some major Israeli policies
but refusing to join with anti-Zionists.
Gordis opens his book by quoting
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli con-
sul general in New York, who wrote
a Times of Israel column in 2017
headlined, “Sorry Israel, US Jewry
Just Isn’t That Into You.” Gordis
notes that many Israelis consider
American Jews spoiled and igno-
rant about the challenges facing
Israel in a violent, unstable region,
and he sets himself the task of ex-
plaining what has happened to this
once-vital partnership.
First, he notes that the relation-
ship has always been more compli-
cated than popularly understood,
and he goes over the history of
anti-Zionism among Reform Jews
in the US. Second, he writes that
liberal American Jews who believe
that their problem with Israel is its
mistreatment of Palestinians or the
primacy of Orthodox Judaism there
are failing to understand Israeli de-
mocracy. American Jews, Gordis
maintains, think their own democ-
racy, with its universalist approach
to minorities and religious neutral-
ity, is the sole legitimate one. In fact,
there is another kind of democ-
racy, an ethnic or nationalist one,
in which, he explains, “all citizens
have equal claims on civil and political
rights, but... the majority group (Jews
in Israel’s case) have some sort of fa-
vored cultural, political, and, at times,
legal status.” (Latvia, Estonia, and Slo-
vakia are also sometimes described as
ethnic democracies.)
Once one grasps this distinction,
Gordis says, much of American Jewish
criticism of Israel amounts not to a dis-
agreement over policies but to a misun-
derstanding of the essence of the Jewish
state. American Jews think they are crit-
icizing what Israel does; in fact, they are
often attacking what it is. In other words,
Gordis is saying that some liberal critics
of Israel are not very different—even if
they don’t realize it—from leftists who
reject the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
There is truth in this argument, but
Gordis overstates his case. For one
thing, he exaggerates how unpopular
Israel is among Democrats. Referring
to a speech by a non-Jewish Demo-
cratic politician half a century ago,
he says, “It is hard to imagine almost
any Democratic politician calling ei-
ther Israel or Zionism ‘a great and just
cause for every person who appreci-
ates justice and freedom.’” He must
have missed the speeches by Charles
Schumer, Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi,
Joe Biden, and many others at recent
AIPAC conferences.
Gordis writes elsewhere that “there
is scarcely an American Jewish liberal
who would dare speak aloud about de-
nying the Palestinian right of return
once and for all.” This is a bizarre state-
ment. I know few American liberals, let
alone liberal American Jews, who think
that Palestinians and their descendants
all must be permitted to return to their
former homes, since this would funda-
mentally alter the Jewish character of
the state. It is true that Representative
Rashida Tlaib and a few others on the
left disagree, but they are hardly in the
Democratic mainstream.
Gordis argues that American Jews
have grafted their secular liberal val-
ues onto their Judaism. As he puts it,
“Welcoming the stranger, dignity for
all human beings, equality under the
law, and respect for dissent and ethnic
difference became religious principles
for American Jews.” Those values, forGordis, fail to address the realpolitik
needs of Israel.
In a recent review of Bari Weiss’s
How to Fight Anti-Semitism in The
New York Times, Hillel Halkin, an-
other American-born Israeli writer,
goes further, arguing that there is no
liberal tradition at all in Jewish history:Judaism as liberalism with a prayer
shawl is a distinctly modern devel-
opment. It started with the 19th-
century Reform movement in
Germany, from which it spread to
America with the reinforcement of
the left-wing ideals of the Russian
Jewish labor movement. As much
as such a conception of thei r ances-
tors’ faith has captured the imagi-
nation of most American Jews, it is
hard to square with 3,000 years of
Jewish tradition.I don’t know why a 150-year-old tradi-
tion should count for nothing. Beyond
that, Jewish liberalism goes back at
least to the 1600s and Spinoza. But the
argument put forth by Halkin and Gor-
dis represents something new. It says
that criticism of Israel from American
Jews is not just mistaken, it’s irrelevant.
It has no basis in Jewish tradition and
little meaning for the Jewish state.
At the start of this century, nearly all
Israeli leaders said they considered an
agreed-upon and fair separation from
the Palestinians in the West Bank tobe vital. As prime minister, even the
revered right-wing warrior Ariel Sha-
ron said in 2003 that holding millions
of Palestinians under occupation—he
repeated the word “occupation” three
times—was bad for Israel and bad for
the Palestinians. His colleagues Ehud
Olmert and Dan Meridor declared it a
matter of existential necessity that Israel
not rule indefinitely over the millions of
Palestinians who aren’t citizens (20 per-
cent of Israeli citizens are Palestinians).
But now, with Gaza ruled by Hamas,
the West Bank Fatah leadership desul-
tory, and the greater Arab world mired
in dysfunction and cooperating with Is-
rael against Iran, the Palestinian ques-
tion has lost urgency. Israel is stronger
and richer: its high-tech startups
(Waze, Mobileye) are being snapped
up, its real estate values soaring.
Israelis live longer, fuller, and hap-
pier lives than the vast majority of
people on the planet. This includes
many Palestinian Israeli citizens
who are physicians, lawyers, re-
searchers, and artists. Forty per-
cent of the undergraduates at the
University of Haifa are Arabs, as
are 20 percent at Technion Univer-
sity, Israel’s equivalent of MIT. So,
Gordis is saying, stop talking about
the occupation. It’s painful and
troubling but harder to fix than you
American Jews realize and matters
less than you believe.In Our American Israel, Kaplan
attempts to explain why Americans
have embraced a country she con-
siders less than exemplary. She lays
the blame partly on American Jews
moonlighting as public relations
agents: “As novelists, filmmakers,
journalists, intellectuals, and mu-
seum curators, they have at times
been more effective than formal
lobbyists... in shaping the way a
diverse swath of Americans have
made Israel their own.” Zionist ad-
vocates, she argues, shrewdly Ameri-
canized the far-from-obvious plan to
build a Jewish state in a land filled with
non-Jews by drawing parallels with the
American experience: standing up to
British imperialism, gathering in immi-
grants from across the globe, building
an informal and cheeky country that
sheds traditions.
Kaplan devotes considerable atten-
tion to Leon Uris’s best-selling novel
Exodus (1958) and Otto Preminger’s
1960 film adaptation of it, and the
way in which the story romanticized
the Jews and ignored the Palestinians.
The hero of Exodus, Ari Ben Canaan,
played by Paul Newman, is in effect a
Jewish cowboy, short on words, long on
deeds. She also reminds us of the fawn-
ing coverage of Israeli soldiers in Life
in the 1960s and cleverly notes the cul-
tural tropes that played well for Israel
over the years, such as the confident
insouciance of its soldiers and the con-
stant focus on the Holocaust.
But her thesis falls far short. She
wants us to believe that Americans
have been hoodwinked into identify-
ing with Israel by slanted coverage, cel-
ebratory television shows, and cunning
lobbyists. This forces her to make some
odd points. For example, when she
looks at Israel’s 1982 invasion of Leba-
non, which killed thousands of civil-
ians, she finds angry American media
coverage. On August 2, John Chancel-
lor of NBC stood on a rooftop in WestBeirut and spoke of the “savage Israeli
attack on one of the world’s big cities.”
He went on: “We are now dealing with
an imperial Israel, which is solving its
problems in someone else’s country,
world opinion be damned.”
One might have thought that such
reportage on the widely watched eve-
ning news would cool the American
romance with Israel. Kaplan says it did,
to some extent, but “equally impor-
tant, and possibly more enduring,” she
argues, was the pushback against such
c overage f rom a nu mb er of Jew i sh i ntel-
lectuals. She cites an article by Martin
Peretz in The New Republic denounc-
ing media portrayals of the Lebanon
War as false. “The fierce backlash,”
she writes, “aimed to counter disil-
lusionment with Israel by monitoring
and censuring the media for anti-Israel
bias.” Peretz will be delighted to learn
that a respected scholar considers his
denunciation in The New Republic
read by thousands to have been “possi-
bly more enduring” than the anguished
lament by an NBC anchorman seen by
millions. But it’s not credible.
Kaplan wants her cultural observa-
tions to expose not only false illusions
about Israel but also about ourselves.
“Looking beyond romantic reflections
of the past—promised lands, chosen
peoples, frontier pioneers, wars of in-
dependence—would enable us,” she
writes, “to see the darker shadows of
shared exceptionalism: the fusion of
moral value with military force, the de-
fiance of international law, the rejection
of refugees and immigrants in countries
that were once known as havens.” I’m
sympathetic to the hope for more nu-
anced and clear-headed understandings
of ourselves. I’m skeptical of getting
there through a critique of Exodus.
A decade ago, the Palestinian issue
seemed central to US foreign policy
and the future of Zionism; today, it has
receded, but things could change again.
The Democrats may take the White
House in November. That won’t lead to
a 180-degree turn, but a shift is likely.
Bernie Sanders, who made a point of
skipping this year’s AIPAC conference
and condemns Netanyahu as racist,
never expresses anti-Zionist views and
rejects boycotts, divestment, and sanc-
tions against Israel. He says he is willing
to consider conditioning some military
aid to Israel on its behavior and work
toward alleviating suffering in Gaza.
Biden, in his 2020 AIPAC address,
spoke of the importance of a “secure,
democratic, Jewish state of Israel.” But
he scolded Israel over its threats of an-
nexation and further settlement build-
ing in the West Bank, saying both were
taking Israel away from its democratic
values, which are central to its alliance
with the US. He also expressed alarm
at the alienation toward Israel taking
hold among some young Americans.
These sentiments still resonate with an
important segment of Israeli society.
It is also possible that the internal Jew-
ish debate could shift as a result of the
spike in anti-Semitic violence in the US
and abroad. Jews are the most frequent
victims of religious hate crimes in Amer-
ica. A sense of endangerment and com-
munal solidarity could stem the drift
of secular Jews away from identifying
with their own people and with Israel.
Whether it does or not, Israel’s essen-
tial dilemma will remain. It calls itself
Jewish and democratic, but it can’t hold
onto the West Bank and be both. Q
—March 12, 2020A Jewish family in the occupied West Bank, 1988MichaBar- A
m/MagnumPhotos