In a recent Facebook posting, author Peter Beinart wrote:
“What frightens me about the organized American Jewish community at times like this is not that our leaders are hawks. A genuine, self-reflective hawk would have a higher threshold for Israeli military action than me, but would have some independent criteria for when the moral and strategic cost of continuing the war grew too high. The Shin Bet leaders interviewed in the Gatekeepers are hawks of this sort. They were willing to take very tough actions to protect Israel but also capable of recognizing when such actions became self-defeating. What frightens me about the organized American Jewish community is that it has no independent standard at all. Whatever the Israeli government does is, by definition, moral. Whatever the Palestinians do is, by definition, immoral.”
Many have said much the same thing, effectively charging American Jews as being more Israeli than Israelis. This is a blanket statement and like all such simplifications, is both right and wrong.
There is a subset of the American Jewish establishment which has always felt free to be openly critical of Israeli government policies-the Zionist movement. Zionist organizations, affiliated with various Israeli political parties, have been taking positions which reflect the stance of those parties for decades. Before Menachem Begin was elected PM in the 1970s, American Herut/Beitar was a gadfly. After Mapai’s long hold on power ended, the various groups affiliated with Zionist Labor wing were often outspokenly critical. This is nothing new - it has always been this way.
If there has been some reticence among the larger, more broad based Jewish groups to express opposition, it isn’t so much that there isn’t dissent (most American Jews, in fact, are critical of Israel’s settlement policy), but because broad based groups are….broad based. They are not likely to take a controversial stance unless there is a consensus in the group to do so. But smaller, politically ideological groups have more leeway. Further, most members of these smaller Zionist groups are also members of the larger, broader organizations. When viewed from this prospective, they are, in effect, caucuses within the larger establishment.
Further, most American Jews are non-Orthodox and their synagogue movements, have always been outspoken on issues of religious pluralism, challenging the religious status quo and the official Chief Rabbinate.
American Jews overwhelmingly see Israel as a central component of their Jewish identity. That being said, it simply isn't true that the actions of this Israeli government, or any previous Israeli government, have been elevated to the status of some religious icon or that dissent is taboo.
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