Gradually, I realized that even as some liberal American Jews started trusting Netanyahu’s desire to build one Wall for one people, he started losing faith in American Jewish liberals’ fundamental loyalty to their people. His tolerance for political risk on the Kotel deal shrank as his frustration with liberal American Jewry grew. It was all about Iran. Just as many liberal Jews felt betrayed by Bibi regarding the Western Wall, he felt they betrayed Israel in blindly supporting Barack Obama’s Iran treaty, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Shortly after Obama concluded the deal in July 2015, the United States transferred $25 billion to $50 billion in long-frozen funds back to Iran. That included $1.7 billion in pallets of untraceable, non-US currency flown to Tehran. Some of that money flowed quickly to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. “As long as Iran has money, Hezbollah has money,” the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah rejoiced in October 2016. Watching that guerilla group committed to Israel’s destruction become a standing army, Bibi told me in frustration, “You understand, liberal American Jews really don’t like Israel.”
“Of course they do,” I replied indignantly. “They’re all building their Jewish identities around Israel.”
“Nah,” he scoffed. “They love an Israel that exists in their imaginations. But the real Israel, which can exist only if we defend ourselves, makes them uncomfortable, because it makes them unpopular with their president. We, however, have no choice. We have to live in the real world, not in the world of their imaginations.”
I once had a pain in my leg that the doctor explained was a sign of back trouble. Such radiating pain in different parts of the human body reflects the fact that each individual is one organic system, connected by all kinds of nerves. Similarly, we can see in the Jewish body politic that discomfort or conflict in one area, say, over Iran, sometimes causes pain elsewhere, say, over the Kotel. These hot issues, which led to repeated cries from Israel and abroad about “betrayal” and worse, reflect both the centrifugal and centripetal forces shaping us as a people today. True, the Iran and Kotel fights spun many of us away from one another in fury. But the anger, and the way the issues sometimes blurred or even fed one another, proved just how deeply interconnected we remain with one another and as a people, which is why it is illuminating to explore these controversies.
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s fundamentalist determination to have a “world without Zionism,” combined with the mullahs’ desperate efforts to develop nuclear power and ballistic missiles, rattled most Israelis. There was a striking consensus among Israel’s political, military, and intelligence experts that Iran posed the greatest threat to Israel’s existence. From the terrorism against the Jewish community in Argentina to the expanding chaos in the Middle East, most Israelis recognized that the issue went far beyond weaponry. Iran aspired to become a regional superpower and global puppeteer of terror, dedicated to fighting “big Satan,” America, while trying to destroy “little Satan,” Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been an international pacesetter in fighting Iran. It was clear to me that he considered himself to be on a sacred mission. When Bibi was foreign minister under Ariel Sharon from 2002 to 2003, he tried convincing the West to restrict shipments and technology transfers to Tehran. As treasury minister from 2003 to 2005, he implored the West to restrain Iran with economic sanctions. He orchestrated the big-tent international campaign against the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile program almost single-handedly.
Bibi’s financial attaché, Ron Dermer, launched the campaign in Congress. He mobilized many of Bibi’s old congressional contacts to sound the alarm in the United States, then the world. Ron was a young Floridian who in 1995 volunteered to work as a pollster for our new immigrants’ party campaign. We became friends. After we won, he made aliyah and eventually became my writing partner.
My only mistake was introducing Ron to Bibi, so Ron could explain the Russian immigrants’ impressions of him during the campaign. Bibi left saying, “Whoa, that guy really doesn’t like me.”
I replied, “He’s telling you what the Russian immigrants think. He’s a pollster; that’s his job.” In a second meeting, the chemistry between the two was obvious. Eventually, I lost Ron as a partner to Bibi, although we remain close friends.
When he returned to the prime minister’s chair in 2009, Netanyahu had one top foreign policy mission: stopping Iran. There was sharp debate about Iran within Israel, but it centered on how to solve the problem—almost every Israeli agreed Iran was dangerous. Some pushed a military solution, destroying Iran’s nuclear development sites from the air. Some trusted the intelligence approach, intervening covertly to sabotage Iranian nuclear development from within. Bibi choreographed the economic strategy, strangling the regime financially while keeping all other options open.
Unfortunately, Bibi’s approach to Iran clashed with Obama’s. Netanyahu believed the regime was too rotten to be redeemed; Obama believed it might be ready to reform. Even when campaigning for the presidency in 2008, a time when most candidates like to appear extra tough, Obama preferred engaging with the mullahs to pressuring them. More broadly, Bibi—like most Israelis—worried about containing Iran’s expansionist foreign policy, because it caused so much regional instability. Obama focused solely on limiting Iran’s nuclear capability.
Beyond the strategic concerns, Obama kept disappointing those of us around the world who expect the American president to champion human rights. When Iran’s grassroots Green Revolution erupted in June 2009, the protesters looked to America’s hip, charismatic, progressive, African American president for help. He let them, and us, down. Obama’s betrayal of those dissidents confirmed Bibi’s fears about his blind spot regarding Iran’s regime.
Before and after the United States signed the treaty with Iran, I joined the concerned chorus warning Americans to be wary. Many of us who survived the Soviet regime kept urging Americans to remember how their country had defeated Communism. In 2013, when pundits and politicians welcomed Hassan Rouhani, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supposedly moderate replacement as president of Iran, I wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal recalling the Western euphoria over Mikhail Gorbachev. Then, as now, the conventional wisdom proclaimed, “If he seems unprepared to meet our demands today, we must meet him more than halfway so he can meet them tomorrow.” But, I pointed out, “tens of millions” of Soviet citizens, including Andrei Sakharov, understood that “only continued Western pressure could, over time, ‘help’ the Soviet leader and the Soviet system reform themselves out of business.” Then, as now, we were called warmongers for advocating strategic pressure. Back then, but not now, “the U.S., to its eternal credit, held firm.”
In 2015, the fight heated up as Obama refused to link the negotiations with Iran to its Middle East machinations and abuses. Iran therefore continued spreading terror throughout the region. Iran armed troublemakers like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the negotiations proceeded. Iran threatened countries with genocide, and the negotiations proceeded. Iran called for the destruction of America itself, and the negotiations proceeded.
“Imagine what would have happened,” I wrote in the Washington Post in April 2015, if, “after completing a round of negotiations over disarmament, the Soviet Union had declared that its right to expand Communism across the continent was not up for discussion. This would have spelled the end of the talks. Yet today, Iran feels no need to tone down its rhetoric calling for the death of America and wiping Israel off the map.”
In another Washington Post article, on July 24, 2015, I reminded Jews that they “stood up to the U.S. government 40 years ago, and should again on Iran.” It was shocking to see that the courageous Jews who had demanded that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger make détente contingent on human rights were silent now. We Israelis were reluctant to criticize our American ally. It was awkward to denounce an agreement everyone insisted would bring peace.
The United States had to choose. It could either appease a criminal regime—one that supported global terror, vowed to eliminate Israel, and executed more political prisoners each year than any other country per capita—or it could stand firm in demanding that Iran change its behavior.
I wondered what changed. Being mischievous, I asked in another article, “When did America forget that it’s America?” I feared that in today’s postmodern world, when asserting the superiority of liberal democracy over other regimes seemed like the quaint relic of a colonialist past, even the United States appeared to have lost the courage of its convictions. Joining the president and their peers, most liberal American Jews easily dismissed Israel’s warning about a negotiating approach that never addressed the broad scope of the Iranian threat.
The tensions between Netanyahu and the liberal American Jewish community peaked in early 2015, when he accepted an invitation from the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to address the Congress that March. With most American Jews in favor of Obama and the Iran deal, they were furious that Netanyahu was insulting the Democratic president by coming to Washington without his invitation. “How dare Israel force me to choose between my loyalty to its prime minister and my loyalty to my president?” one activist seethed.
Bibi believed he was sticking to his historic mission to defend Israel from destruction. Certain that Obama’s deal would threaten Israel’s future, Netanyahu sought out prominent platforms to broadcast his message. All the formalities—who invited whom, when and where—struck him as silly compared to this existential threat.
Looking back, many of his supporters view that speech as Benjamin Netanyahu’s finest hour. He did what he does best: define an effective strategy and articulate it effectively to the world. Today, Netanyahu feels even more justified, sure that Iran’s subsequent aggressiveness vindicated him. And he undoubtedly takes satisfaction in knowing that it was his persistence that kept the Iran issue on the international agenda, and on Donald Trump’s agenda. Yet, many American Jewish communal leaders are still seething about that speech and resent Bibi’s persistence. Clearly, even beyond the Iran deal, the speech itself became a core issue that radiated pain.
In the summer of 2015, when most liberal American Jews ignored the Israeli consensus and supported the Iran agreement, Bibi still hoped the realities of this bad deal would ultimately convince them. To the Israeli government and most of the Israeli opposition, the agreement was reckless. It gambled with Israel’s security and the West’s. As billions of oil dollars flowed back to Iran, hundreds of millions of terror dollars flowed straight to Hezbollah, thanks to the United States. Spending Iran’s money liberally, Hezbollah morphed from a ragtag series of terror cells into a well-financed, formidable army, planning terror strikes abroad too. Even as the IDF hurriedly improvised doctrines to defend against this new threat, liberal Jews were grumbling about the Israeli government’s continued attempts to polarize the political situation and cross their beloved president.
As furious as I was with Bibi over his Kotel switch, I could understand how irritating all these American Jewish attacks were to him. In the fall of 2016, while visiting Jewish Agency absorption centers in the north, I received a local military briefing. I could not believe how much our security situation had deteriorated in the year since the treaty was signed. Hezbollah’s capacity to attack civilians, kidnap soldiers, and barrage Israel with missiles had soared. Even worse, the northern commanders shared a new worry: a possible Hezbollah invasion could cut off the city of Metullah from the rest of the country and hold thousands of civilians hostage. Yet, as I absorbed this sobering news, our American partners in the Jewish Agency requested a brainstorming session during the next board of governors meeting about how to stop the Israeli government from alienating American Jewry by campaigning aggressively against the Iran deal.
The nature of the complaints drained Bibi’s patience. He felt that, even when Israel faced the dangerous consequences of the deal with Iran, liberal American Jews ignored these facts because they preferred Obama’s vision of reality. These frustrations with the majority of American Jews undoubtedly made Netanyahu less willing to risk his coalition—making him more vulnerable to persistent ultra-Orthodox pressure to abandon the Kotel deal in June 2017.
Of course, Bibi never admitted this connection publicly. But both his ambassadors to the United States, Michael Oren and Ron Dermer, share my belief that there is a direct connection between the position of liberal Jews on the Iranian deal and Bibi’s Kotel retreat.
The debate over the Iran deal posed a classic clash between the two largest Jewish communities’ priorities, their competing Jewish survival strategies. For all the divisions in the country, most Israelis agreed with Netanyahu that their three top strategic worries were a nuclear Iran, a nuclear Iran, and a nuclear Iran. And most Israelis also agreed that Obama’s Iran deal would only toughen the country against Israel.
At the same time, for most American Jews, supporting President Obama did not just express the fact that two-thirds or more voted Democratic. Barack Obama beautifully incarnated their American dream, that this democracy protected minorities and gave everyone the chance to succeed. It was my dream too.
Obama was the first black president. I remember that thrilling election night in 2008. I, too, was proud that America had finally chosen an African American with what Obama himself used to joke was a “funny name.” Truthfully, I felt badly for my kindred spirit, the Republican nominee Senator John McCain, who had suffered for five and a half years in North Vietnamese prisons—he had refused to accept an early release unless every American captured before him was released too. We met when John was still a congressman on my first trip to Washington in 1986. We clicked immediately—like two ex-cons in a convention of preachers—when he looked at me and said, “I understand why you refused to be released on the USSR’s terms two years ago.”
From the start of the presidential primary campaign, even a tough customer and fierce advocate of Israel like Marty Peretz of the New Republic supported Obama, partially because his life story fulfilled the American Jewish dream. Peretz wrote that Obama’s election would “give fullness to the paradigm and promise of an open society.” Others, to Peretz’s left, praised Obama as “the first Jewish president,” with Peter Beinart going so far as to write that “Obama reminds Netanyahu of what Netanyahu doesn’t like about Jews.” Beinart meant liberal American Jews like him. Matt Nosanchuk, Obama’s White House Jewish liaison for three years, would say the president has a “Jewish soul” and is “very much in sync with the majority of [the] American-Jewish community—he’s committed to social justice and prioritizes issues like civil rights and equality, and he values intellectual discourse.”
I witnessed that deep connection between so many American Jews and their liberal president in 2011 when I addressed the Union for Reform Judaism biennial in Washington. That Obama spoke to them only magnified their enthusiasm for the president. Any time his name was mentioned, it felt like waves of electrical impulses were rousing the audience.
The devotion reminded me of the zeal with which the Likud Central Committee welcomed Ariel Sharon or Benjamin Netanyahu on various election eves, serenading each as “king of Israel.” Even in 2011, four years before Netanyahu’s controversial speech to Congress, whenever Bibi’s name was mentioned at the Reform biennial, it was like someone had poured water on the crowd to douse any enthusiasm. I often heard booing too.
By 2015, the mention of Obama’s name to many Israelis triggered their most protective, patriotic instincts. From the start, many had doubted Obama, because he promised to “engage” with Iran. They felt let down by his Cairo speech, his early visit to Egypt and Turkey but not Israel, and his silence during Iran’s failed Green Revolution. Every testy exchange with Bibi made things worse, with the Iran deal just proving the security-minded skeptics right.
Marty Peretz was soon beside himself, outraged by Obama’s “scandalous approach to the Middle East,” which included a “coldness to the Jewish nation,” a “hostile indifference to Israel.” Peretz denounced Obama’s “clinical allergy to power.” He defined the president as “weak-willed and weak-kneed” in dealing with foreign adversaries, and he concluded, “It is with Tehran that Obama has architected the greatest foreign policy disaster of his administration.” Most American Jews didn’t flip with Peretz. It was easier to turn against “Bibi’s Israel”—which so many progressives hated—instead of the progressive president they loved.
Under these conditions, with American Jews’ Isaiahan fantasy about the first African American president being deeply Jewish at heart clashing with Israelis’ Davidian worries about the Iran deal, Bibi had a hard time cutting through and making his case against Obama’s agreement.
I attended many, many roundtables about the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry during the Obama years. At one, held at the JPPI, Dan Kurtzer, the first Orthodox Jew appointed to serve as America’s ambassador to Israel, now teaching Middle East diplomacy at Princeton, insisted, “In order not to lose American Jews, the Israeli government has to change its attitude toward President Obama.” I responded, “How would you feel if I said, ‘In order not to lose Israel, you should change your attitude toward Bibi’?”
American Jews and Israelis were forgetting that we are siblings, not twins. Each part of our family is not quite ready to acknowledge that we have chosen to live in very different neighborhoods. Most Jews were sticking with their particular survival strategy.
It would have been naive to expect that any dialogue would change the Israeli government’s or American Jews’ attitude toward Obama. But a healthier dialogue might have helped American Jews take Israeli alarm more seriously. And Israelis could have been much more sensitive to the standing this “first Jewish president” and first African American president enjoyed among American Jews. This kind of exchange could only have occurred if we had first succeeded in lifting the curtain that fell between the factions in this fight and trusted the other side’s sincerity.
So even though I was angry with Bibi about the Western Wall, I recognized that he captured many Israelis’ growing frustration with liberal American Jews. Increasingly, it seemed the only times some Jews brought up Israel was to bash it. At the same time, many American Jewish friends felt that, for all his rhetoric about leading the Jewish people, this prime minister and his electorate kept disappointing, even double-crossing, the Jewish people. Cries of betrayal echoed throughout the Jewish world, no matter who talked about what topic.
I could feel it, for example, in the intense debate regarding the Africans from Sudan, Eritrea, and elsewhere who entered Israel and stayed illegally. With only thirty-five thousand or so illegal migrant workers in a country of nearly nine million people, I thought this problem was solvable.
Trying to mediate, I invited representatives from both sides to my office. The pro side, representing most American Jews and many Israelis, saw Israel’s threats to deport these immigrants as a betrayal of Jewish values. After all, hadn’t we been strangers in Egypt, on the Lower East Side, in British Palestine?
The con side represented 73 percent of Israelis who were fed up with African migrants illegally overstaying their welcome. We all know that stable, democratic countries have become magnets for refugees and are having trouble managing the nearly infinite need. But Israel is the closest democracy to these distressed countries, as well as one of the world’s smallest democracies. Given Israel’s geographic proximity to so many millions of desperate refugees hoping to make it to Europe, a lenient policy would inevitably put this small state at risk of being overwhelmed. Seeing these migrants as mostly fleeing poverty, not oppression, Israel’s leaders felt that letting masses in too easily would betray their responsibility to keep Israel stable. Once again, many Israelis felt betrayed that American Jews would sacrifice Israel’s needs to feel liberal “on our backs.”
These clashing symbols were crushing subtleties and obscuring common values. Most Israelis wanted to be humanitarian without being overrun. When I approached Bibi with a plan to absorb one hundred Syrian orphans into various Jewish Agency youth villages, he asked me, “And where will they go two, three, five years from now?” We both knew that under international law, Israel would be obligated to let them stay if they wanted to.
“If we take one hundred today, they’ll press us to take one hundred thousand tomorrow,” Netanyahu said, emphasizing how small we were and how close we were to so many potential refugees. “But we will happily help not just a hundred but thousands, even tens of thousands in all kinds of ways, without offering permanent homes.” Showing Israel’s goodwill, Bibi emphasized that under his leadership Israel was already giving urgent medical assistance in our two northernmost hospitals to Syrians fleeing the civil war.
While visiting those hospitals, I had seen how sensitively the doctors and nurses worked, giving hundreds of horrifically wounded Syrians the most sophisticated medical care available often for months on end, before the patients returned to their families. No one asked whose side they or their families were on. These programs kept growing, regardless of cost, with Netanyahu’s direct encouragement and Israel’s full subsidy. Ultimately, Israeli doctors treated more than five thousand Syrians, no questions asked, until Assad’s regime doomed the humanitarian effort.
Of course, such fine-tuning didn’t fit the “humane Left” versus “heartless Right” stereotyping that feeds the partisan hostility.
I saw a similar sense of mutual betrayal in the international cross fire over the controversial nation-state bill the Knesset passed on July 19, 2018. The law, which took seven years to pass, badly divided the Jewish world over the central tension of my life: how much do we emphasize our particular identity as a Jewish state and how much do we emphasize our universal democratic commitments in this law—especially because equality and liberty were already guaranteed by other Basic Laws and Supreme Court decisions. By sixty-two to fifty-five, with two abstentions, the Knesset defined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and detailed the state’s symbols, capital, language, and calendar.
Once again, instead of having the nuanced debate we needed, partisans reduced the conversation to a clash of false choices. The bill’s supporters said they were just stating the obvious, that the force of Zionist history and the citizens of Israel democratically determined that Israel is a Jewish state. Those opposing the bill said it was obvious to them that Israel was no longer interested in being a Jewish-democratic state.
I was invited to be the final speaker at a conference about the bill, shortly after it passed. The organizers assumed that as the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, I would blast the critics and support the law.
I did, initially. I rose and said, “If you asked me about the law in a word, I would say ‘good.’” The pro side applauded enthusiastically. “But,” I added—recalling a famous Jewish joke—“in two words: ‘not good.’” Everyone turned quiet, confused.
I explained my position. Of course Israel has the right and need to assert the basics of its proud national Jewish identity in a world of postmodern hostility that questions our state’s legitimacy. The bill emphasized the state’s mission to keep Jews and Judaism alive, physically and culturally. While fulfilling our responsibility to ingather the exiles, expressed in our Law of Return, it was legitimate to have a flag with a Jewish star, to make our Jewish holidays national holidays, and speak Hebrew. When other countries affirm their national identity in similar ways, it’s called patriotism; when we do it, it’s called racism.
At the same time, the law failed to affirm Israel’s sacred symmetry as a Jewish-democratic state. As a Basic Law, it should have reaffirmed the vow in Israel’s Declaration of Independence protecting the equality of all of Israel’s inhabitants, avoiding this false choice between our identity and our commitment to human rights. It was wrong to leave our Arab and Druze citizens feeling neglected, especially by a Basic Law that took so long to negotiate.
The pro side’s experts gave me a long explanation about the complicated dynamics between our government and the Supreme Court, and why the vow of equality I wanted to add was unnecessary. The Supreme Court does that job anyway. Equality was already assured by a steady stream of court decisions, they promised.
They were correct technically, but so wrong symbolically. The nation-state law was unnecessarily asymmetrical, even if there were other counterbalances. Usually in life, if you lack simple answers, take the hint—there’s a problem.
To illustrate the mess we were creating, I said, “Ask our campus representatives to explain all these subtleties to the angry crowd using this Basic Law as ammunition to further attack us as an ‘apartheid state.’ See who actually understands that the law safeguards the state as Jewish, while the court safeguards it as democratic.”
Missing the point, and washing their hands of responsibility for Diaspora Jewry, the experts insisted, “That’s not our problem. That’s your job.”
For their part, Israelis were often stunned by the constant media reports emphasizing American Jewry’s growing disengagement from Judaism and from Israel. With an intermarriage rate of 70 percent, and still soaring, many liberal American Jews had stopped calling intermarriage a problem. They called it an opportunity. Some even praised it as a blessing.
When the popular novelist Michael Chabon received an honorary doctorate from the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, his charge to the graduates seemed to cross yet another line. Calling “endogamous marriage”—marrying another Jew—a “ghetto of two,” Chabon dismissed Judaism by saying, “The whole thing’s a giant interlocking system of distinctions.” Showing no sensitivity to the dangers facing Israel, he dismissed “security” as “an invention of humanity’s jailers.” He went on, “Security for some means imprisonment for all.”
Almost everyone in attendance applauded enthusiastically, except for one Israeli student who walked out in indignation. As many Israelis, both secular and religious, read Chabon’s remarks, they found the scene a betrayal of their core Zionist and Jewish identities. Many Israelis active in the Reform movement understood how such antics would hurt their movement’s credibility in Israel.
The controversy confirmed many Israelis’ fears that Reform Jewry is a halfway house for those ready to leave Judaism. Reform Jews resent this caricature. They see their denomination as a creative way to live as modern Westerners and as Jews simultaneously, from generation to generation.
If we were squabbling over one or two issues, the crisis would have felt manageable. But it seemed that the issues that kept triggering the key charges—“they betray Jewish values” versus “they betray the Jewish people”—were piling up like Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls.
Having been falsely imprisoned for high treason and knowing how many millions of lives were ruined by similar false Soviet accusations, I take words like “betrayed,” “treason,” and “traitor” seriously. That’s why it is so painful to hear so many crisscrossing accusations of betraying Jewish values or betraying the Jewish people.
Everything becomes a loyalty test: Israel’s treatment of all migrant workers or Arabs or non-Orthodox religious streams betrays Jewish values. All American Jews’ ignorance, intermarriage, and indifference betrays the Jewish people. “How dare you?” so many bellow across the divide, refusing to recognize that their opponents’ position might have any validity.
From one side, regarding the Kotel, I heard, “How dare you compare an issue central to our survival, like stopping Iran’s campaign to annihilate us, to a minor symbolic issue like the Kotel, which involves Jews who are not ready to live here fighting for an alternative space that is already open to them, even if it’s not official!”
From the other side, I heard, “How dare you compare Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cynical double-cross, after four years of negotiations and public promises, to our sincere support for President Obama’s noble efforts to make peace!” We are in trouble when opposing sides in an argument strike similarly absolutist tones, displaying parallel blind spots.
I did hear some good news hidden in all the arguing. The tensions and fury were problems of the third stage—of being so deeply interconnected. Just as the nuclear family sometimes explodes because relatives are wrapped up so tightly in each other’s psyches, Jewish people fight so intensely because we’re so wrapped up as one. We get mad with one another instead of giving up.
Decades ago, our need to save one another pushed any differences aside. But when American Jews are sending their kids to Israel for a positive Jewish experience, suddenly, official Israel’s negative attitudes toward their Jewish expression becomes very relevant and infuriating. When Israelis turn to American Jews to defend Israel against delegitimization, suddenly, some Jews’ negative attitudes toward Israel become relevant and infuriating.
A more basic clash underlies many of these tensions between Israeli Jews and the Diaspora. Many American liberals cannot forgive Israelis for becoming the oppressors in the world’s eyes. Meanwhile, many Israelis cannot forgive liberal American Jewish critics for seeing Israelis as victimizers of Palestinians instead of as the victims of Palestinian terror.
The steady drip of Palestinian terror attacks—along with the occasional bursts of warfare and the constant attacks in the media, on campus, and elsewhere—keep reducing the grand Israel story to this one dimension: the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Diaspora Jews expect Israel to inspire them, not disappoint them. Israelis expect Diaspora Jews to defend them, not disappoint them.
It has become fashionable to blame Israel’s rigidity in the age of Bibi for the ongoing stalemate with the Palestinians. That caricature overlooks dramatic shifts in Israeli public opinion. The Left won part of the argument: more and more Israelis, even many right-wingers, including Benjamin Netanyahu, admit that it’s bad for Israelis to continue controlling millions of Palestinians. But the Right won, too, in part: more and more Israelis, even on the Left, admit we cannot withdraw immediately or unilaterally without a solid agreement with reliable negotiating partners who accept Israel’s right to exist.
Most Israelis believe in a two-state solution. The widespread fear that there is no serious negotiating partner on the Palestinian side has discouraged the Israeli prime minister from rushing ahead with territorial concessions. Yet, as that 1970s-era slogan, “peace now,” loses ground in Israel, that’s precisely what more and more American Jews demand. They blame “Netanyahu’s Israel” for “the stalemate” and assume he is a one-stater when he doesn’t offer massive amounts of territory as an opening gambit. They demand that Israel solve the problem and end their ongoing embarrassment as quickly as possible.
Israel seems stuck in a post-Oslo pattern: Israel suffers from Palestinian terrorist attacks, often launched from the most vulnerable and populated urban areas. Israel then goes to war while imposing self-restrictions no other democratic army follows. Jews from all over the world fly in, bringing moral support and generous donations. Yet Israel is still condemned as a war criminal for its “disproportionate” response, leaving more and more progressive Jews squirming. When those Jews echo the harsh words of the outsiders, the family ties make the insiders’ cries all the more painful.
“You are losing me… and many, many people in the Jewish community,” a liberal Jew told a group of Israeli members of Knesset at a Boston town hall in 2017. Three years after the 2014 Gaza War had ended, she and many others were still troubled by the disproportionate numbers. “I cannot look the other way,” she said, “when three Israeli teenagers are brutally murdered, and the response is to kill 2,300 Palestinians.”
The Israeli parliamentarians, from right to left, scoffed, shocked by her one-sidedness. The Knesset members remembered how thousands of Hamas missiles sent millions of Israelis into shelters, including some of their own children and grandchildren. They knew all the military advantages Israel sacrificed—and continues to sacrifice—to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties while fighting terrorists who were secreted in neighborhoods and hiding behind innocents. “If I have to choose between losing more lives of Israelis, whether they are civilians or soldiers, or losing you, I will sadly, regretfully, rather lose you,” one member replied. This response to the lost liberal was mostly ignored in America. It went viral in Israel, rousing Israelis fed up with being judged by self-righteous Diaspora Jews.
Twice during my years in the Jewish Agency, Israel went to war to try to stop Hamas from bombing Israeli civilians. Each time, we worked around the clock, making sure bomb shelters were clean, comfortable, even fun. We bused thousands of children away from the regions Hamas targeted, arranging fun days and homes to host them. Our Diaspora partners, particularly the American Jewish Federations, were characteristically generous. They financed these efforts with emergency campaigns yielding millions of dollars.
During the 2014 Gaza conflict, I arranged for one American Jewish leader involved with these humanitarian efforts to be photographed with Benjamin Netanyahu as a thank you. When he proudly sent this picture to his family, his son snorted, “Why would you be photographed with that butcher?”