Wherever We Stand
What are the odds that the Israeli attack on Gaza pulls the U.S. into something like a world war in the next few weeks?
They aren’t zero. The U.S., Iran, and Israel are already launching missiles. Israel keeps threatening to start a full-scale war against Hezbollah, and while the foreign correspondents tell us that Iran doesn’t want a direct fight with Israel or the U.S., Israel seems to be doing its best to provoke them.
The American Jewish community needs to think urgently about the risk to global peace the ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza presents, and what it imagines it is achieving by continuing to support Israel’s war effort.
American Jews are not responsible for Israel’s actions in Gaza. The American Jewish establishment’s unlimited support for Israeli violence, however, has helped provide political cover for the Biden administration’s policy of supplying the Israelis with weapons while making no enforceable demands about how they use them.
President Biden could stop the attack on Gaza, and cool the escalation in the region, by ending the shipments of U.S. arms to Israel. The Israelis need those deliveries to continue to prosecute their war, but the president has yet to use that leverage in any serious way. Perhaps he is temperamentally or ideologically incapable of taking a hard line with Prime Minister Netanyahu. But if Biden is at all susceptible to political pressure, the American Jewish community is uniquely situated to apply it.
Palestinian suffering at an incomprehensible scale, and incontrovertible evidence of Israeli atrocities, has not made a dent in the American Jewish mainstream’s support for the attack on Gaza. Though leftist Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now staunchly oppose the Gaza invasion, and even liberal Zionist groups like J Street, which supported the war for months, have finally begun to call for a ceasefire in the past few days, the American Jewish establishment continues to justify the Israeli attack in language that implicates every American Jew.
“The Jewish people remain at war — a just war of self-defense to remove an existential threat — and we will continue until victory,” read a statement last week from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a powerful umbrella group that includes the three largest American Jewish religious denominations, the three largest U.S. rabbinical organizations, and all the major Jewish advocacy groups.
The American Jewish community needs to think seriously about what it imagines victory to mean in Gaza, and what cost it thinks the world should pay to get there. American Jews are accustomed to demands for automatic support for Israeli military policy: Recall that old Hillel International slogan, “Wherever We Stand, We Stand With Israel.” In these dangerous weeks, the refusal to perceive a diversion in interests between the Israeli political leadership and American Jewry could have fatal consequences.
The Israelis tell us they are fighting for the return of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas. It was obvious from the start that their flattening of Gaza would not achieve either aim. The Israeli forces have not freed the hostages; all but one who have been freed were released through a negotiated swap. As for Hamas, its stature, support, and influence has only grown since October 7, and its near-term military defeat is a fantasy.
For Netanyahu himself, on the other hand, the benefits of prolonging the invasion are clear. An end to the war would bring an election in Israel, a likely end to his prime ministership, and a potential prison sentence on the corruption charges currently working their way through Israeli courts.
American Jews should not be defending the Israeli attack on Gaza to the American public as a “just war of self-defense” in the interest of keeping Netanyahu out of prison.
The worst-case scenarios are not all that far-fetched: A new war between Hezbollah and Israel that pulls in Iran, then the U.S., and then other regional and global powers. A rapidly expanding battlefield, a paroxysm of death, a halt to global trade.
For American Jews, whose advocacy has been a key pillar of U.S. support for the Israeli invasion, a slide into global conflict would present real dangers. The Jewish community would face blame, rightly or wrongly, for pulling America into a black hole of a conflict that seems likely to be extremely unpopular domestically, creating new threats to our physical safety and our political comfort.
The men who run the Presidents’ Conference, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federations of North America, and the other leading establishment groups, and who speak to the White House and Congress on behalf of American Jews, have no accountability to the broader Jewish community. The weak democratic processes that once existed in some of the groups by virtue of the fact that they were reliant on broad bases of small donors have been steamrolled by the advent of a class of ultra-wealthy philanthropists, who have bought and paid for the establishment leadership.
The arrogance of these philanthropists, sitting safe behind phalanxes of doormen in their Park Avenue apartments, won’t let them consider the costs they impose on the rest of their community by implicating us in their fanatical support for Netanyahu and his government. They live unreal, insulated lives; private planes, private chefs, private schools; courted by toadying nonprofit executives who affirm every paranoid, lunatic political fantasy as they snatch away the proffered checks. They don’t care what a U.S. war with Iran would mean for the rest of us. They don’t care what it would mean to live as an American Jew if Americans start dying in large numbers in a war that only Netanyahu wanted.
Those of us who live outside the cocoons of the ultra-rich will pay a different price. And while the leaders of the Jewish establishment don’t answer to us, their legitimacy is still based on our consent to be led. If these American Jewish establishment leaders cannot understand why continued support for Netanyahu’s war imperils us all, that consent must be withdrawn.
That could mean the withholding of donations, or dues, or program fees. It could mean public criticism of the establishment leadership by small donors, or resignations by staffers. It could mean rabbis quitting rabbinical organizations, synagogues quitting denominations, organizations quitting umbrella groups. It could mean direct demands that the individual leaders of groups step down.
The Jewish establishment’s collective shrug at the suffering of Gazan civilians uncovered a moral and intellectual rot that presents long-term challenges to those of us who care about the American Jewish tradition. In the short term, though, the demand that the Jewish establishment cease its support for Netanyahu’s war so that it does not explode into a global catastrophe can unify even an American Jewish community fractured by political divisions in the months since October 7.
It might be too late to prevent global conflagration. If American Jews can help push Biden to put a stop to Israeli aggression, however, we need to try.