On Israel, Jews and Leaders Often Disagree

[Cees Binkhorst]

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The core of Judaism — truth, fairness, kindness, freedom.
Doorgeven ;)

Groet / Cees

May 5, 2010
On Israel, Jews and Leaders Often Disagree
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/politics/06jews.html
By PAUL VITELLO

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. — Criticizing Israel has long been the
equivalent of touching a third rail in many Jewish families and
friendships, relegating disagreements to a conversational demilitarized
zone where only the innocent and foolhardy go.

“You cannot really engage in that conversation,” said Phillip Moore, a
teacher in this Detroit suburb who has embraced strong opinions on many
topics in his life — on politics, education, even religion — but avoids
the subject of Israel at gatherings of his Jewish relatives.

“You raise a question about the security forces or the settlements and
you are suddenly being compared to a Holocaust denier,” said Mr. Moore,
62. “It’s just not a rational discussion, so I keep quiet.”

But the recent tension between the Obama administration and the Israeli
government over the stalled Middle East peace process have put the
questions underlying those long-avoided family discussions directly in
the public spotlight. They have raised serious questions about whether
the traditional leadership of the American Jewish world is fully
supported by the mass of American Jews.

The issues arose last month when American officials openly rebuked
Israel over the announcement of new housing plans in east Jerusalem, and
are likely to grow as indirect talks between Israelis and Palestinians,
mediated by the Obama administration, resume this week. President Obama,
working to ease those tensions, met on Tuesday with the Nobel laureate
Elie Wiesel, who had criticized the administration in an advertisement
last month.

Many other prominent Jews, representing the conservative organizational
leadership that has been the dominant voice of the Jewish community for
decades, have also recently criticized the Obama administration’s
pressure on Israel. Some have even accused the White House of sabotaging
the foundations of the Jewish state.

Former Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York spoke for many stalwart Israel
backers last Sunday when he told an angry crowd of 500 gathered outside
the Israeli Consulate in Manhattan, in a videotaped statement, that
President Obama’s demand for a settlement freeze in East Jerusalem was
nothing less than an orchestrated effort “to undermine the legitimacy of
the state of Israel.”

But while those voices have been strong and their message unmistakable,
a newly outspoken wing of Israel supporters has begun to challenge the
old-school reflexive support of the country’s policies, suggesting that
one does not have to be slavish to Israeli policies to love Israel.

“Most Jews have mixed feelings about Israel,” said Rabbi Tamara Kolton
of the Birmingham Temple, a secular humanistic congregation in
Farmington Hills. “They support Israel, but it’s complicated. Until now,
you never heard from those people. You heard only from the organized
ones, the ones who are 100 percent certain, we’re right, they’re wrong.”

In the 2008 election, 78 percent of Jewish voters supported Mr. Obama,
and surveys have suggested that most continue to back his policies.

In a survey taken after the diplomatic skirmish of March, the American
Jewish Committee — the heart of the traditional mainstream — found
little change in the level of Jewish support for Mr. Obama’s handling of
relations with Israel. The survey found that 55 percent approved of his
handling of Israeli relations, compared with 54 percent last year. (His
disapproval rating rose five points, to 37 percent.)

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder of a Washington lobby known as J Street, the
latest of several organizations representing the voice of liberal Jews
who support Israel but not all its policies, said many people have long
felt ignored or silenced by the pro-Israel establishment in the United
States.

“People are tired of being told that you are either with us or against
us,” he said. “The majority of American Jews support the president,
support the two-state solution and do not feel that they have been well
represented by organizations that demand obedience to every wish of the
Israeli government. If you had taken their word for it, Obama should
have gotten 12 percent of the Jewish vote. But he got 80. That should
say something.”

Within the vast spectrum of opinion, though, American Jews continue to
have strong attachments to Israel, and the recent tensions have produced
intense, often angry, debate. The rancor led delegates at the annual
convention of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella
community relations group that includes almost all major American Jewish
organizations, to adopt a resolution in February calling for a halt to
“a level of uncivility, particularly over issues pertaining to Israel,
that has not been witnessed in recent memory.”

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League,
predicted that Mr. Obama’s approval ratings among Jews would soon
reflect what he called “a deep distress” over his approach.

“People are angry,” he said. “Americans do not want peace shoved down
the throats of the Israelis.”

But Professor Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist at Hebrew Union College in
Manhattan who co-wrote a study last year charting a steep decline in
attachment to Israel among younger Jews, said the younger and
liberal-leaning are frustrated at being labeled “anti-Israel” or even
anti-Semitic for expressing opposition to Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Many liberals cite a recent crackdown in San Francisco as an example.
After leaders of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco
learned that one of the film groups it supported had sponsored the
screening of an Israeli documentary critical of Israeli security forces,
“Rachel,” about an American woman killed in Gaza, they adopted new rules
early this year prohibiting any of the cultural organizations it
supports from presenting programs that “undermine the legitimacy of the
state of Israel.”

William Daroff, vice president for public policy of the Jewish
Federations of North America, defended the San Francisco federation’s
decision. “An open exchange of views within the pro-Israel community is
good,” he said. “But there has to be some sort of line between
constructive discussion and destructive communication that does not
recognize Israel as the eternal home of the Jewish people.”

The questions that Jews are now facing are rooted not in being for or
against Israel, but in the shadings of difference over how to achieve
peace, and the complexities of the relationship between Israel — a state
whose government is now dominated by nationalist and ultrareligious
politicians — and the predominantly liberal-leaning and secular base of
Jewish support in the United States.

The struggle to define the middle ground was in evidence last month
among a small group of Jewish Americans who gathered in a suburban
Detroit synagogue to describe the view of the recent turmoil from
somewhere in the demographic middle.

They were seven people from the “more or less inactive” list of the
Birmingham Temple, said Rabbi Kolton, who gathered them at the request
of a reporter because they roughly matched the profile of about 60
percent of American Jews, according to various studies: They do not
belong to a synagogue and do not attend services or belong to Jewish
organizations, yet they consider themselves Jewish — bound in a web of
history, culture and DNA to their Jewishness, and by extension, to Israel.

“My parents were Jewish, so I’m a Jew,” said Rosetta Creed, 87, a
retired hospital administrator. “I get into arguments with people who
knock Israel.”

All said that they had voted for Mr. Obama, supported his efforts to
prod Israel and believed there would never be peace in the Middle East
without determined intervention by the United States.

Nonetheless, “It makes me angry that the Israelis are always blamed for
the problems and asked to make concessions,” Ms. Creed said. “You know,
the Israelis are not the ones launching rockets and placing fighters in
houses with children inside.”

In different ways, each referred to the history of Jewish persecution
throughout the world and noted that the absence of it here and now did
not spare one the occasional flash of insight and dread — when swastikas
desecrate a synagogue or neo-Nazi militias appear on the six o’clock
news — that Israel will always be one’s last sanctuary.

With many of their children intermarried, they pondered what meaning
Israel would hold for their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“Let’s face it, with each generation we are getting less and less
Jewish,” said Irving Hershman, an insurance agent who was raised in an
Orthodox home. He predicted, with regret, that the bonds between
American Jews and Israel would dissipate in 5 or 10 generations.

Mr. Moore, the headmaster, expressed frustration that the voice of
Israeli advocacy in the United States was monopolized by what he called
the “Israel right-or-wrong” camp.

Israel is not just the homeland of Jews but of Jewishness, he said, and
should be known for its embrace of the values at the core of Judaism —
truth, fairness, kindness, freedom.

That is what he would tell those hard-line relatives of his, he said,
“though I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t change their minds.”

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