Israel and American Jewry: A Parting?

Henry Siegman

Politics, Americas

Netanyahu’s bid to secure reelection by allying with Israel’s far right is antagonizing American Jews.

The Zionist idea—the restoration of Jewish national existence in Palestine—took shape in the late nineteenth century, a time when the concept of nationalism was coming into its own. We now know it is an idea that can harbor dark and destructive forces that yielded World Wars I and II, bringing death and destruction on a scale no one could have imagined.

The two wars led to the emergence of less restrictive concepts of national identity and to multinational institutions, beginning with the League of Nations, which evolved into the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, NATO, and other regional institutions that have sought to soften and humanize the sharper edges of nationalist ideology. More recently, however, a backlash to that trend has produced a resurgent reactionary populist and authoritarian nationalism that has brought to power political actors, institutions and ideas that have racist, fascist and anti-Semitic parentage. The United States has not been spared.

In its earliest phases, Zionism was seen as a progressive movement, supported by labor unions and democratic socialist organizations, although it was opposed by the overwhelming majority of European Orthodox Jewry, which saw Zionism’s secular nationalism as heresy. More recently, following several decades of Likud political dominance in Israel, it has become increasingly clear that Israel is forging a national identity that is religiously defined, a definition recently adopted by Israel’s Knesset as a Basic Law.

That legislation left no doubt about its meaning when its sponsors declared the right to national self-determination in Palestine to belong uniquely to the Jewish people—not only the Jews who live there now but also those who may yet come to live there in the future. Palestinian Arabs and other gentiles who live there now, and even lived there for countless generations, have no such right. Yet non-Jews who convert to Judaism gain an immediate right to Israeli citizenship, as well as the right to national self-determination that Palestinians—including those who are Israeli citizens—cannot exercise, no matter how long they and their previous generations may have lived in Palestine.