One Sunday last year, as I stood at the weekly Israelis for Peace gathering in Union Square Park, a young couple stopped for a moment. The man caught my eye and pointed at his partner’s shirt, which read “Zionist” in the pink Barbie font. “See this? See this?” he called out. She flashed me a smile, and the two walked away before I could ask them why they thought the word “Zionist” somehow served as a rejoinder to a gathering of Israelis and American Jews mourning both Israeli and Palestinian dead, and calling for an end to the war for the good of everyone.
Of course it’s not just the Jewish right that can’t seem to reconcile caring about Israeli Jews with caring about Palestinians. Those on the left who justified Oct. 7, who tore down hostage posters and who dismiss all Israeli Jews as settler colonialists are similarly guilty of this zero sum thinking.
But most Jews have little trouble simultaneously affirming care and concern for Israel and Israelis and opposing Israeli policies, including the extended war in Gaza, the occupation of territories captured in 1967, and the expansion of settlements. Poll after poll, including the recent Washington Post study of American Jews, have demonstrated this to be true. Interestingly, in the Jewish Federations of North America survey released recently, respondents’ emotional attachment to the United States and willingness to criticize its government track closely with the responses regarding Israel. It turns out that most people understand that one can feel attached to a country and oppose its policies and government.
And yet, major Jewish legacy organizations continue to insist that support for Israel requires denying the realities of occupation, justifying violence against Palestinians and rejecting Palestinian self-determination even while affirming the same for Jews.
It’s no surprise then that the JFNA poll shows that a vast majority of Jews feel a strong connection to Israel and believe it should continue to exist as a Jewish state, but that only 37% consider themselves to be Zionists. Jewish legacy organizations have contributed to such a poisoning of the term Zionist that 80% of those who identify as anti-Zionist believe that Zionism means “supporting whatever actions Israel takes.”
Since the 1960s, Jewish legacy groups have made a concerted effort to sideline any Jewish organization that dares to criticize the Israeli government or to call for an end to occupation. Mainstream organizational pressure effectively destroyed Breira — an anti-occupation Zionist group — in the 1970s and its successor New Jewish Agenda, and has sought to do the same to groups like J Street, New Jewish Narrative, New Israel Fund and T’ruah (which I lead).
In the spring of 2002, when I was a fourth-year rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the major Jewish organizations announced a mass rally in support of Israel on the National Mall. JTS, like virtually every Jewish organization on the East Coast, was shutting down for the day and sending buses to Washington. My classmates and I struggled about whether to join. Many of us, myself included, had spent the previous year in Jerusalem, terrified to ride buses or eat in restaurants during the wave of suicide bombings that characterized the second intifada. We worried about our friends now studying there. But we also expected that speakers at the rally would denigrate Palestinians and justify violence against civilian populations.
Together with peers from five other rabbinical schools, we formed a contingent that we called Rabbinical Students for a Just Peace. In the end, more than 100 students from these schools wrote to the leaders of major organizations calling for the “American Jewish community [to] acknowledge Israel’s mistakes and recognize the humanity and the pain of the Palestinians.” We joined the rally with signs calling for peace and justice for both peoples.
The response was swift. Recipients of the letter publicly questioned our attachment to Israel. Rally attendees surrounded our group, yelling, pushing and tearing at our signs. Classmates applying for jobs that year and the next were interrogated about their commitments to Israel.
Nearly 20 years later, in the midst of the 2021 Gaza war, a new generation of rabbinical students wrote yet another letter criticizing Israel’s excessive use of violence in that conflict. Again, powerful voices sought to push these up-and-coming Jewish leaders out of the community. Synagogue leaders announced that they would not hire rabbis who had signed the letter, or pushed for interns to be fired. To this day, every spring I get phone calls from rabbinical students and rabbis trying to negotiate the job process after signing that letter or otherwise expressing views critical of Israeli policy.
As the CEO of T’ruah, an organization that represents more than 2,300 rabbis and cantors, and that advocates for the human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians, I have been told more often than I can count that we are outside of the proverbial tent, or that we are too left to speak at a particular Jewish conference or to attend a meeting. Major Jewish foundations and federations have declined to fund or ceased funding our domestic work because of our opposition to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or because we began calling for an end to the war, including the return of hostages and cessation of bombing, in December 2023. Groups like J Street have fared similarly, including being rejected from membership in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
I personally don’t think the terms Zionism and anti-Zionism serve us any longer. The Zionist movement succeeded in establishing a state in 1948, just like other national movements of the 20th century have succeeded in establishing other states or continue to strive to do so. Today, Israel is a state like any other, and is subject to the same international laws as any other member of the United Nations. We need a new vocabulary to describe the conviction that most American Jews actually have: a deep connection to Israel and belief that it should be a Jewish and democratic state, and a willingness to fight for Palestinians’ rights and to criticize the Israeli government.
The JFNA poll demonstrates that the word Zionism today serves only to obscure real conversations about the future of Israel and Palestine. It also shows that the Jewish legacy organizations have succeeded in their efforts to define Zionism as support for even the worst Israeli government policies. If these organizations do not want to lose a generation of Jews from having any relationship with Israel, they would do well to reconsider the decades-old policy of pushing aside those who believe that real commitment to Israel’s future requires fighting also for the rights of Palestinians.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
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