American Jews love Israel, but as the Jewish state celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding, many are finding it harder and harder to like it. Recent controversies over the peace process and religious tolerance have accelerated a longstanding trend: American Jews, for a variety of reasons, have been detaching from a Jewish state that once comprised a pillar of their Jewish identity.
That complex process worries Israeli officials and it poses an enormous challenge for American Jewish leaders, who realize this core fact: Like it or not, American Jews and Israel are linked even as their local cultures diverge. If the estrangement continues, both will be hurt.
Two related trends are crashing headlong into each other, creating both cultural and political dangers for the Jewish community.
The first is a natural drift from concern about Israel as the state matures and as the romantic myths of its creation recede.
Israeli diplomats around the country report declining interest in their programs; Jewish organizations that raise money for Israel are finding it significantly more difficult to do so — and it’s not just the pluralism fight that’s at fault. Even Jewish newspapers report declining reader interest in stories about the Middle East.
An earlier generation that witnessed the Holocaust and saw firsthand the compelling reasons for Israel’s rebirth is passing from the scene; their children and grandchildren tend to see Israel through a very different lens.
American Jewish attitudes about Israel were shaped by the Holocaust and by the image of heroic Zionists struggling against fantastic odds to create a safe, secure haven for the Jewish remnant.
The image of Israel carried by many older Jews to this day was created by novelist Leon Uris in “Exodus,” with the tough Ari Ben-Canaan and his Haganah band.
Jewish organizations mobilized to help the besieged state, and Jews responded with fervor. It’s a cliché that activism for Israel replaced religion as the core of Jewish identity for many, but it’s also true: This was a grand cause, a collective passion.
But those images and that paternalistic relationship do not jibe with the Israel of the 1990s — strong, prosperous, a touch arrogant.
Younger Jews don’t feel the same compulsion to devote their lives to protecting its existence; despite its dangerous neighborhood, many see Israel as perfectly able to take care of itself.
Instead of plucky kibbutzniks, younger Jews see an Israel of cell phones and Pizza Huts. Instead of determined citizen-soldiers, they see Israel as an occupying power, with the routine brutality that occupation always entails.
Older Jews still think of Ben-Gurion and Weizmann and Meir; younger Jews are familiar mostly with the surly Shamir, the ineffective Peres, the endlessly maneuvering Netanyahu and a cast of characters in the Knesset that seem every bit as conniving and mercenary as our own democratically elected lawmakers. Not exactly the stuff of heroic novels.
Those images are not always fair, but they are the reality for many American Jews, and it’s the reality Jewish leaders here must contend with.
At the same time, the bitterness of the debate over Israel’s future — the question of how to proceed along the road to peace, how to define what it means to be a “Jewish” state — has been a turnoff to many American Jews.
The 1993 Oslo peace agreement was supported by most American Jews, but it also seemed to give many license to pull away still further. The apparent end of Israel’s isolation and precariousness meant that they could turn their attention to closer-to-home problems.
But the collapse of that process did not yank them back to the pro-Israel cause. On the contrary, many look at the current stalemate with dismay, mostly blaming the Palestinians but also seeing culpability in the Netanyahu government.
“It’s just those crazy Middle Easterners,” many Jews seem to say, dismissing the peace cause as hopeless. Israel, in the view of some, has become an alien Middle Eastern entity consumed by archaic-seeming religious and cultural feuds, not the transplanted European culture of its founders.
For decades, the realities of Israel’s perilous existence masked the great cultural gap between American Jews and the Jewish state they supported; today, with Israel strong and prosperous, that gap is impossible to ignore.
The peace process has generated bitter divisions in Israel and a growing lack of consensus in this country. Many American Jews are turned off by the growing stridency of the debate, the decline of civility.
When a small but vocal minority of Israelis celebrate the life and mass murder of Baruch Goldstein and turn his grave into a shrine, when Israelis applaud the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, many American Jews shed even more of their illusions about Israel and more of their commitment.
Similarly, the pro-Israel movement in this country seems dominated by a bitter, strident right wing that is alien to most American Jews and by an Orthodox community that has increased its commitment to Israel even as commitment has eroded in other segments of the Jewish community, skewing the pro-Israel movement in the direction of religious Zionism.
The pluralism battles are another part of the problem.
Reform and Conservative Jews, the backbone of the pro-Israel movement in this country for so many years, feel rejected as the Israeli government, dependent on fervently religious coalition partners, grants even more power to religious authorities who deny the very legitimacy of these streams of Judaism.
All of these factors are coming together to accelerate a trend that has been slowly separating American Jews from Israel for more than a decade.
This disconnect threatens pro-Israel power in Washington and Jewish unity worldwide.
Pro-Israel groups still have thriving young leadership programs that are busily creating tomorrow’s generals and colonels in the pro-Israel cause.
But will there be the infantry that these groups have always counted on? Many Jewish leaders are deeply worried.
And will Israel remain a unifying force for a fragmented, increasingly apathetic American Jewish community or one more source of division? So far, the signs are mixed.