Published: 20 August 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
I’m not making value judgments. I’m not suggesting who’s right and who’s wrong. But I am predicting the future. Israel will be abandoned by the majority of American Jews in less than a generation. Unless….
The images crowding my crystal ball say it all. The first to appear was Ronald Lauder. Back in March, the president of the World Jewish Congress – one of Israel’s most venerable and ardent advocates, a self-proclaimed conservative who has “supported the Likud party since the 1980s” – penned an op-ed in The New York Times revealing his concern over Israeli policies that have brought him to “fear for the future of the nation I love.”
Elaborating, he blamed “extensive Jewish settlement-building” in the West Bank and “Israel’s capitulation to religious extremists” as being responsible for the “severe erosion of the global Jewish community’s affinity for the Jewish homeland” – particularly among Jewish millennials.
Significantly, he didn’t point a finger at those who are distancing themselves, but rather at the government of Israel whose actions “contradict their values.” Seemingly his as well. Certainly those of my nephew, one of those 30-something American Jewish youngsters he’s concerned about who floated in just behind Mr Lauder.
“You know, Uncle David, in America the entire Left is against Israel,” he told me just after the Times article appeared. I took that as a diplomatic way of saying “me too.”
Seems that the 10-day inoculation against susceptibility to criticism of Israel that he’d received as a participant on a Birthright program hadn’t fully taken.
Not surprisingly, actually, as over my nephew’s shoulder I spotted the co-founder of Birthright shouldering up to Lauder. Though hardly of the same political persuasion, Charles Bronfman is to be reckoned with as one of the organized Jewish community’s preeminent leaders and among Israel’s most prominent supporters.
So when he warns of the “growing rift” between Israel and the Diaspora, we’d better weigh his words with the utmost seriousness.
FULL STORY We're on the edge of a precipice here (Jerusalem Post)
Photo: Pro-Israel demonstrators chant slogans in New York City in 2015 (Reuters)
