DIASPORA DIVIDED: Where does Israel lie in the hearts and minds of Diaspora Jews?

In the first of a series on faultlines among the Jewish people, CLIVE LAWTON examines the centrality of Israel in the Diaspora: where once it was a non-question, today it is a topic for robust debate

ANYONE UNEASY ABOUT criticism of Israel hasn’t spoken to any Israelis for a while. They are hardly united on anything. Indeed, it is one of the most impressive features of Israel throughout its comparatively short life that dispute remains so robust and so open.

I doubt there is another country so beset by existential challenges through its short life that has retained all the openness and fractiousness of Israel without at least occasionally sinking into military dictatorship.

But – even if we don’t waste swathes of time on Twitter, Tik Toc and friends – we know that disagreement has become far more disagreeable in recent years. Reflecting the strident tone which appears to be de rigueur online, Jews seem hardly able to stomach being in the same room with their policy opponents.

The differences that concern me here, however, are of a more philosophical quality. Put bluntly, how significant should Israel be to Jews of the diaspora? (There’s a parallel issue in Israel as to how significant the diaspora should be to Israel. Certainly, to judge by the behaviour of many Israelis abroad, the answer is “not much”.)

So where should Israel be in the hearts and minds of diaspora Jews? Many who have not looked closely or listened much might think this is a non-question. Surely Jews are committed to Israel. Indeed, to use a common term among passionately Zionist Jews, don’t all accept “the centrality of Israel”?

In the 1990s, when I was helming Jewish Continuity, the initiative of the late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, there were many who felt it was obvious the organisation should include a commitment to “the centrality of Israel” as part of its aims.

But I already felt this made assumptions about Jewish positions that would narrow our appeal. Yes to “importance” or “significance” – but “centrality”? ( I should come clean and admit that I was the boy who wrote in 1967 that we should knock down the Western Wall since it would become a site for idolatry – have I been proved wrong? – so my positions are perhaps literally iconoclastic.)

Before Israel was founded, being a non- or even an anti-Zionist was uncontroversial. Widespread views ranged from believing that the founding of a Jewish state was the “only solution to the Jewish problem” to the conviction that founding such a state would create bigger problems.

Well-settled diaspora Jews feared accusations of dual loyalty, though that reservation must have felt foolish once the dust cleared and we saw what had happened to “well-settled Jews” throughout Europe. Others felt uneasy about prospective relationships with those others – not yet Palestinians – living in the Land. Still others objected on various theological grounds.

Once the state was declared, only a few flat-earthers could continue to object, though many still had private misgivings. It didn’t turn everyone into Zionists but there were few within the established Jewish community that remained anti-Zionists. Of course, those with theological objections were the hardest to dislodge. (I know a Chabad rabbi who still, when leading the prayer for the State of Israel in shul, swallows the word medinat (state). No-one else notices since they’re  too busy robustly declaring it  themselves.)

Then there are the unreconstructed, Soviet-style socialists who not only object to nationalism in all its forms (except when it’s theirs) but especially to Jewish nationalism since they resist the idea of the Jews as a nation (odd, since any “nation” is just a political construct). Either that or they’re just anti-Semites.

So I’m not going to luxuriate in the fringes of the Jews, though their number may be bigger than we think.

But in 1967, even the Progressive Jewish world, until then generally ambivalent about Zionism, given its own mission to help Jews integrate into local society and culture while retaining their core Jewish commitments, committed itself to Zionism.

The evident threat to Israel’s existence, surrounded by belligerent neighbours armed to the teeth and intent on destruction, brought nearly all Jews out, giving blood, raising funds, flying over to volunteer.

Atavistically, Jews felt “these are my people”, feared for them and signed up to help. Soon, all Jewish youth movements had to be “Zionist”, though prior to that, Zionism had been a distinguishing feature of only a few. Habonim and Bnei Akiva were where you’d go for the Zionist experience. Reform youth activities and Hineni, even Maccabi, not so much.

In the 1970s, the infamous, not to say ridiculous, UN “Zionism is racism” resolution had impacted on campuses, forcing almost all identifying Jewish students to stand up and be counted, given that their own their Jewish rights to support Israel – or not – were being put under the cosh.

In the 1980s, though, things started to shift. Young Jews had learnt a new equilibrium. They knew how to face down the nonsense they encountered. At the same time, Israel embarked on the Lebanon incursion and so for the first time engaged in an extra-territorial war that might easily be viewed as aggressive rather than defensive. (We’ll overlook Suez).

The shock of the Sabra and Shatila massacres was a further blow to anyone insisting that Israel was always the wronged. Though it must be said that the way Israel faced up to the massacres and addressed its (passive) role was, oddly, one of its finest hours and puts to shame most of its fellow “liberal democracies” who still often find it difficult to face things they did even a century or two ago.

The 1990s brought the Oslo Accords and for many, new hope that Israel would not be a source of conflict and challenge but of unalloyed pride. But at the same time, Israelis were themselves starting to question how they had got into a situation of taking charitable funds from diaspora communities who needed the money to sustain themselves.

In the old days, Israel had tent cities of refugees far beyond the capacity of any country to absorb: another inspiring story which puts our current mealy mouthed, “no-room-here” approach to refugees and asylum-seekers to shame. When visitors needed to take their own toilet rolls to Israel, it was only reasonable to help build the country’s hospitals and universities.

But surely, given all we know about Israel as the “start-up nation”, should it not be housing its own homeless, providing its own ambulances, protecting its own beaten women?

The unbreakable bond is broken. Israel no longer needs us. (Whether or not we need Israel is a longer discussion.) Many committed Jews feel ambivalent or worse about current Israeli policies and their first emotion is embarrassment.

Even when that isn’t the case, they see it as foreign. What’s more, as Jews loosen their links with their local Jewish communities, it can’t be surprising that they also start to lose any particular passion they have for Israel. Finally, as it becomes more common to see Israel, sometime rightly, often wrongly, as the arrogant aggressor, many sigh with despair or resignation when it comes up in conversation at work or college.

This is not an article wasting time on the minority of Jews – let alone the non-Jews – who feel Israel should not exist or that it ought to be singled out for special opprobrium, nor am I claiming that mainstream Jews are giving up on Israel.

But many are shifting their position. For example, a recent British analysis established that at least 30 per cent of Jews described themselves as non-Zionist.

Where once it might have been almost obvious to most that “the centrality of Israel” was a rallying cry, it is now the case that robust commitment to Israel, just because you’re a Jew, is a topic for discussion – and you won’t necessarily like the outcome.

Artwork: Avi Katz