'Only Clarity'
The leaders of the American Jewish community have shown over the past two-and-a-half months that there is no limit to the violence they will countenance against the Palestinians in Gaza. Even now, with one out of every hundred people who lived in Gaza before the invasion now dead in Israeli attacks, mainstream American Jewish leaders have had little but praise for the Israeli war.
The head of the national umbrella group of local Jewish federations, among the most significant Jewish organizational leaders in the country, told an audience in Cleveland in early December that the Israeli military campaign was proceeding with “extraordinary care for innocent civilian life,” and that “protection of innocent lives is a constant goal of Israel’s war strategy.”
Even J Street, the liberal Zionist group that sold itself to a generation of young American Jews as a “pro-peace” movement, waited until early December, after the Israelis had killed 17,000 Palestinians in Gaza, to feebly threaten that its support for the Israeli military campaign “is not without limits.”
Two weeks later, J Street drew the line at 20,000 dead Palestinians, saying on December 21 that President Biden should tell the Israelis to “shift to a far more targeted and limited operation.” Other liberal Zionist groups made similar statements the same day. Together, those timid requests for a bit less slaughter are the farthest any mainstream American Jewish group has gone in criticizing the Israeli attack. Meanwhile, the rest of the American Jewish establishment continues to endorse the Israeli assault wholeheartedly.
American Jewish leaders, whose institutions have worked over decades to erase the borders between Zionism and American Judaism, are not capable of a serious rebuke of the Israelis. They cannot imagine an American Judaism without political Zionism as its central tenet and “support for Israel” as its only creed. Their careers, salaries, and identities are bound up in the idea of American Judaism as a handmaiden to the Israeli state. Accusing the Israelis of having been too brutal in their treatment of Gaza’s civilians would undermine the myths that sustain their institutions and their worldviews.
Instead, they are building an alternative political and moral reality; one that allows American Jews to sit comfortably in their own convictions as Gaza burns.
The American Jewish mainstream has always been indifferent, at best, to Palestinian suffering. In the months since October, as the whole world has watched Israel produce a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, mainstream American Jewish attitudes have only hardened. American Jews who cried over Rabin’s assassination and cheered Oslo; who advertised themselves as opponents of the settlers and sent checks to Seeds of Peace; are now rationalizing unlimited Palestinian death.
I listened earlier this month to David Remnick’s interview with Mosab Abu Toha, the Gazan poet and New Yorker writer who was held by the Israeli army for two days in November. In the interview, the poet describes being ordered at gunpoint by an Israeli soldier to drop his 3-year-old son, separated from his wife, told to strip naked, slapped in the face, kicked in the stomach, and kicked in the face. At that point, the interview stopped, and the podcast went to a commercial break, which consisted of a sponsor message from New York City’s local Jewish federation, advertising that the federation is “continuing to respond to mounting needs in Israel.”
The federation has been running these advertisements for months. A similar ad ran in front of “The Daily” episode this past week, in which a New York Times reporter described how each United Nations school sheltering displaced Gazans is housing 12,000 people on average, with no running water.
It is good that the New York federation is responding to humanitarian needs in Israel. After Abu Toha has described being beaten by Israeli soldiers, however, or after the Times reporter has talked about food shortages, hunger, a lack of clean drinking water, and a spike in infectious disease among Gazan civilians, it’s hard not to notice that the federation ads make no mention of the needs of Gazans. Paying to play the ads endlessly on public radio amounts to a public statement of principles for the Jewish federation; an assertion to the listeners of WNYC and “The Daily” that the organized Jewish community does not care what happens to Gazan civilians.
Hundreds of professionals work for the New York City Jewish federation. Thousands of donors have the federation’s ear. The fact that none of them have persuaded the federation’s leadership that these advertisements are an embarrassment, both to the federation and to the Jewish community at large, points to the vast distance between the reality the American Jewish establishment is inhabiting, and the one inhabited by the rest of the world.
Virtually every major U.S. ally has called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Even in this country, most Americans understand that Israel is acting irresponsibly. Only 30% of U.S. voters think Israel is doing enough to avoid civilian casualties, according to a recent poll. Among American Jews, meanwhile, 81% support Israel continuing the war, according to another poll.
This growing moral gap between American Jews and the rest of the world reflects a strategic success for the American Jewish leaders, who have worked this winter to cultivate an atmosphere of isolation and fear. They depict the rhetoric of student activists as a dire threat to Jewish safety. They tar the left as anti-Semites. They demand Jewish unity in the face of what they describe as an unprecedented danger. They are constructing, for American Jews, a new political and moral reality, in order to justify any extreme of Israeli violence.
In his speech in Cleveland, the national Jewish federation leader asked his audience to imagine if a terrorist organization dug tunnels under a Cleveland hospital, and then “launched an attack across West 117th Street” into a Cleveland suburb with a large Jewish community. “What would we do if all this happened to us? Would we allow this organization to maintain its capacity to destroy? Not in a million years. There is no room for equivocation or explanations. Only clarity.”
American Jews need to resist this sophistry. The new Jewish reality that the mainstream American Jewish leadership has sought to create in the months since October 7th will not thrive in the U.S. We cannot live comfortably in a diverse, pluralistic, multi-ethnic society while trapped in a parallel moral universe that begrudges the humanity of anyone but ourselves.
This retreat from reality presents a challenge both to those seeking an end to the violence in Gaza, and to those seeking a future for Jews in America. American Jewish leaders, locked in a destructive embrace with the Israeli state, are backing the rest of us into a dangerous corner. It’s time for American Jews to think clearly about the implications of our unlimited support for the Israeli attack on Gaza, and what it will mean for American Jews to be remembered as its last, loudest cheerleaders.
If American Judaism is to survive this moment as anything more than a husk, American Jews need to deny the legitimacy of a Jewish establishment that has for too long chipped away at the ethical and intellectual heart of American Judaism in service of Zionism and the Israeli state.