As Joe Biden assumed office in January 2021, having earned an estimated 77 percent of the Jewish vote, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict barely rated as an item on the White House agenda. Writing in an online Jewish publication, Tablet, in January, former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren announced that “the Arab-Israeli conflict is dead.” The following month, the Palestinian diplomats and scholars Hussein Agha and Ahmad Samih Khalidi came to the same conclusion in the pages of in the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal, Foreign Affairs: “The official Arab-Israeli conflict has ended.”1
The Palestinians had indeed lost their place on the Middle East’s center stage. In the Arab world, hostility toward Israel was displaced by a de facto coalition between Israel, the United States, and most of the Arab states against Iran and its scattered allies, anchored by the Abraham Accords between Israel, the Gulf nations, Sudan, and Morocco (with the implicit support of Saudi Arabia). Meanwhile, during the domestic turbulence of the four consecutive deadlocked elections the Israelis found themselves forced to conduct between 2019 and 2021, the issue of peace with the Palestinians rarely even arose as a topic of serious discussion. When the nation’s new leader, Naftali Bennett, flew to New York to address the UN General Assembly and Jewish Federations of North America in September 2021, he made no mention at all of the peace process or the occupation in either forum. Just before he arrived, Bennett’s office let it be known to reporters that “there is no diplomatic process with the Palestinians, nor will there be one.”2
Bennett’s reticence was especially remarkable given that barely ninety days earlier, the Israelis and the Palestinians had been at war. The conflict had grown out of a series of raids by Israeli police on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest shrine, which sits atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest shrine, inside the gates of the Old City, during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. Two miles north, in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Israelis had been using a complicated set of legal maneuvers to evict the Palestinians and replace them with Jewish families, giving fresh inspiration to what were now years’ worth of angry demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, each one threatening to explode into violence. A week after the first police raid, a Jewish mob marched through the city chanting “Death to Arabs” and attacking random Palestinians in its path. More evictions and police raids followed. On the final night of Ramadan, police used tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber-tipped bullets aimed at Al-Aqsa worshippers. Palestinian protests spread across the West Bank and into Israel proper, where random mobs on both sides began attacking civilians in mixed cities. The IDF killed eleven protesters on the West Bank, and the country appeared to be on the verge of civil war.3
When the Palestinian Authority canceled what would have been its first democratic election in fifteen years and began rounding up and jailing—and occasionally killing—its opponents, Hamas leaders sensed an opportunity to unite disaffected Palestinians under their banner by claiming that Hamas was the defender of Islam’s holy sites and leader of their resistance. Hamas began firing rockets into Israel proper, attacks that Human Rights Watch would later label “war crimes.” The Israelis responded, as always, asymmetrically. Their eleven-day bombing campaign, “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” resulted in more than 256 deaths in Gaza (including 66 children) and injured nearly 2,000, according to Hamas. The Israelis counted 4,360 rockets and mortars launched at Israeli population centers. Owing to the effectiveness of the US-Israeli Iron Dome antimissile system and the inaccuracy of the Palestinian rockets, the death toll was limited to twelve civilians on the Israeli side, of whom two were children. The conflict was clearly not “over.”4
While the punditocracy remained largely pro-Israel, however, what no doubt shocked many of Israel’s supporters was the willingness of so many in the mainstream media to report from an unapologetic Palestinian perspective. The Washington Post ran a more than five-thousand-word investigation of Palestinian life under occupation, which it portrayed as a hellish landscape made up of constant humiliation, frequent settler violence, and occasional (and almost always unpunished) IDF killings. The New York Times published a heartbreaking front-page photo montage of dead Palestinian children, killed in Gaza by Israel’s bombing, beneath the headline “They Were Only Children.” Just four days earlier, another heavily produced and promoted story appeared on page one titled “Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict.” These stories were followed by a twenty-two-minute documentary on the Times website about the brutal police-state tactics employed by Israeli soldiers enforcing the occupation in the Palestinian city of Hebron, on behalf of the 850 Israeli settlers who lived there. It was directed by a filmmaker who had formerly served in the IDF and described exclusively in the words of the Israeli soldiers who enforced it.5
The photos alone came as a shock to the New York Times audience. The ADL’s Abe Foxman emerged from retirement to announce the cancellation of his Times subscription over the stories, tweeting that he had read the paper for sixty-five years, but “today’s blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people on the front page is enough.” Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center called the pictures “libelous against the Jewish state,” and further complained that they were published “amidst a tsunami of antisemitic attacks by pro-Hamas forces across the United States.” The Times, he insisted, had gone from “being the paper of record for the United States of America—the world’s greatest democracy—to becoming the newspaper of record for Hamas.”6
The war that some Palestinians had come to call their “Unity Intifada” coincided with the final days of Bibi Netanyahu’s term as prime minister. Biden’s team was thrilled when Netanyahu’s political opponents managed to cobble together a hydra-headed, left/right, religious/secular, Jewish/Arab coalition to finally end Netanyahu’s twelve-year reign in June 2021. (Months earlier, Biden had waited an unmistakably symbolic full month before returning the Israeli prime minister’s call of congratulations to him after his own election.) Adding to Bennett’s precarious position, his sixty-one-member coalition included thirteen lawmakers from the right and far right, including Bennett himself. Given that fragility, the threat of Netanyahu’s return lingered like what one Israeli columnist termed “a bear in the basement.” Biden and company did their utmost to avoid poking the bear by making difficult public demands on Bennett’s government that might give a single legislator the urge to switch sides and bring Netanyahu back into power.
As the onetime head of the Judea-Samaria-Gaza Settlers Council, founder of a far-right political party, and Israel’s first Orthodox Jewish leader, Bennett was every bit as committed to settlement expansion as any of his predecessors. His stated position: “We won’t annex territories and won’t create a Palestinian state.” But, once in office, he sought to further entrench the occupation whenever possible, and with it, practices that, on the West Bank at least, clearly fit the International Criminal Court’s legal definition of “apartheid.” Palestinians living under military occupation in the same geographical location as Israeli settlers did not enjoy a fraction of the latter’s rights. In fact, they enjoyed barely any rights at all. What’s more, they found themselves vulnerable to a growing epidemic of vigilante violence from Jewish settlers in this period. Settler attacks were carried out with virtual impunity, often with the implicit support of the Israeli military, rising to more than 400 in just the first five months of 2022, a rate that nearly doubled that of the previous year. In those instances where authorities did intervene, just 4 percent of the settlers accused of what Major General Yehuda Fuchs, the commander of Israeli troops in the West Bank, called “settler terrorism” ever found themselves facing actual charges. The 88 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military and police (in addition to three killed by Israeli civilians) during Bennett’s year in office, was also a massive jump of more than 60 percent above the last year of Netanyahu’s rule.7
Biden’s team tried to minimize the significance of Bennett’s relentless efforts to expand and entrench the occupation, at least in public. It did blacklist a state-sanctioned private high-tech spyware company, NSO, whose wares had been deployed against US diplomats, dissidents, and human rights workers worldwide, and privately managed to prevent Israel from building new settlements in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem that would have made any future sharing of the city impossible, but only temporarily. But, breaking a campaign promise, it did not re-open the US consulate in East Jerusalem that, before it was closed by Trump, had served Palestinians there since 1854, as the Israelis continued to object. In May 2022, moreover, as Biden was preparing for a visit to Jerusalem, as was very nearly custom by now, the Israeli Defense Ministry announced its approval of plans for building 4,000 new housing units in Jewish settlements in the West Bank in addition to the 1,300 units it had announced the previous October. The reaction, once again, was muted at best. The Biden administration “strongly opposed” the decision but took no other action, as the Israelis insisted to the Biden team that the survival of its teetering ruling coalition, having already lost its one-vote majority, demanded such actions, as the “bear” continued to roam the basement, eager to pounce, until those efforts finally failed in June 2022, and the Bennett government announced that Israelis would go to the polls for the fifth time in barely more than three years.8
When Bennett’s government finally collapsed, he resigned and was replaced as prime minister on an interim basis by the former journalist, Yair Lapid, who had founded and led the centrist party, Yesh Atid [“There is a Future”]. Not long afterward, Israel caused a worldwide uproar in the human rights community by simultaneously raiding seven Palestinian human rights and civil society organizations it deemed “terrorist,” owing to their alleged connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Its forces confiscated property, sealed off office doors, and posted official notices declaring the groups illegal. But the Israelis were unable to substantiate their charges to anyone who asked for proof, including the US CIA. Back in mid-July, before the raids but after Israel had announced the “terrorist” designations of the groups in question, twenty-two Democratic representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Blinken complaining that “a reported lack of evidence to support this decision raises concerns that it may be a deeply repressive measure, designed to criminalize and silence prominent and essential Palestinian human rights organizations.” Following the raids, Israel found its actions condemned by over 150 global organizations organized by Human Rights Watch, nine members of the European Union, and eight liberal American Jewish groups operating under the umbrella “Progressive Israel Network.” New Israel Fund CEO Daniel Sokatch opined in the Forward that “Israel is not acting like the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ as it declares itself to be. American Jews should urge our leaders to tell Israel: Cease and desist from persecuting human rights defenders—their work is critical to your democracy.” Despite Israel’s inability to substantiate its charges, the Biden government was willing only to “voice [their] concern,” and then only via their ambassador, rather than Secretary of State Blinken, much less the president himself. Bibi Netanyahu was already running hard in the coming election with the support of Israel’s most extremist right-wing parties; doing nothing to improve his chances was clearly the administration’s primary—and perhaps—only priority.9
Among American Jews, public political criticism of Israel had traveled well beyond its previously heavily policed borders, but American Jewish leaders continue to deny this. As late as February 2022, William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents, would straight-facedly tell a reporter, “I believe the broad consensus of American Jewry is pretty much in one place.” He termed the Jewish state to be both “a central force of who we are as a Jewish community” and “part and parcel and a key foundation of 21st century American Judaism.” Yet, as Israel’s former consul general in Boston, who is now executive director of J Street, Nadav Tamir, far more accurately explained, Israel had long taken the support of diaspora Jewry for granted, “expecting it to serve as a vital resource to generate pro-Israel support, a cash machine for unconditional funding.” At the same time, “the attitude of the Israeli religious establishment toward the non-Orthodox denominations of Judaism has left a large majority of the Jewish people”—that is, 90 percent of American Jews—“out in the cold.” These tensions were exacerbated by Israel’s drift toward illiberalism, both at home and in its relationships abroad. All of this, he concluded, “led to a situation where the Jewish nation has become more of a divisive element for Jews than a unifying force.”10
Among the many incidents that demonstrated the truth of Tamir’s diagnosis was the profound disjunction that arose over Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The US Jewish community was almost wholly united in support of the victims, both proud of and awed by the bravery and eloquence of its unlikely leader, the Jewish former comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. The Israelis, meanwhile, took a much more circumspect attitude toward the conflict, seeking to retain its good relations with the Russian dictatorial strongman Vladimir Putin at the expense of the country his military was in the process of destroying with near-genocidal aggression. This was so even though Putin supplemented his attacks with a barrage of shockingly antisemitic propaganda, going so far as to equate Zelensky (who lost much of his family in the Shoah) and company to Hitler and the Nazis.11
Following an alarming increase in reported global antisemitic incidents in the wake of the May 2021 war, some of them violent, Jewish leaders, led by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, organized what they expected to be a mass rally in Washington “in Solidarity with the Jewish People.” It drew a mere two thousand attendees. Many “pro-peace” Jewish organizations, including J Street, Americans for Peace Now, and T’ruah, boycotted the gathering, because its organizers had refused to distinguish between antisemitism and harsh criticism of Israel. The demand on the part of the organizers that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism be understood to be indistinguishable was no longer accepted by much of the Jewish community, and hence was undermining any hopes for a unified response to what all agreed was an alarming rise in antisemitic attacks, both physical and rhetorical.12
AIPAC poured metaphorical oil on this fire when, after finally deciding in December 2021 to create a super PAC that would donate directly to congressional candidates, it announced, in April 2022, that it was endorsing over one hundred Republicans who had enlisted in Donald Trump’s campaign to destroy American democracy. Boasting million-dollar contributions from right-wing Republicans, including Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus and hedge fund manager Paul Singer, AIPAC sought to defeat progressive candidates in Democratic primaries with advertisements that never even mentioned Israel.
It invested an eye-popping $6 million in just one Democratic primary to ensure the defeat of yet another woman of color who had been critical of Israel, former Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards. Weeks later, continuing to act as a kind of death star for progressive Democrats facing members of the party’s centrist wing, it invested another $4.2 million in defeating the liberal Zionist Congressman Andy Levin. A member of a Michigan Jewish dynasty, Levin had not only authored the “Two-State Solution Act” in the House, designed to ensure that Israel did not close off the possibility of one day making peace with the Palestinians, but also provided a neighboring representative, Palestinian-American Muslim Rashida Tlaib, with strong statements of friendship and support. This was a particular concern for his opponents because, as one former AIPAC President David Victor emailed Levin supporters, “Andy sincerely claims to be a lifelong Zionist, proud Jew and defender of Israel.… So when Andy Levin insists he’s pro-Israel, less engaged Democratic colleagues may take him at his word.” Unlike most of AIPAC’s more than $26 million investment in the 2022 Democratic primary process—$10.5 million of which was devoted strictly to attack advertisements—this race did feature Israel as a key issue. J-Street came across with $700,000 for Levin; Bernie Sanders rallied with him and Tlaib; and members of the left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow showed up in the district to knock on doors wearing “Jews for Andy” t-shirts. AIPAC could therefore declare a victory over those Democrats who were moving with the majority of the party toward a more sympathetic view of the Palestinians and more critical one of Israel, albeit one funded with right-wing Republican money.13
In yet another hard-fought primary in Brooklyn and Manhattan that followed, AIPAC took credit for helping to defeat yet another woman of color—an Asian American woman named Yuh-Line Niou—in a tight race with the more centrist Dan Goldman, who was also opposed by two other progressive candidates of color. (Niou, who had been endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, said she strongly supported the free speech rights of BDS activists, without explicitly supporting the movement itself.) What was distinctive about this intervention was the fact that AIPAC hid its participation under the name of a previously unknown cut-out, apparently understanding that among this heavily Jewish population, its support might be perceived negatively by voters. With an impressive (and revealing) display of chutzpah, the organization proceeded to attack its rival J Street for accepting a one million dollar donation from George Soros—an attack that J Street noted was consistent with the “fear mongering and hate-mongering” about the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor that the head of the ADL had termed in other contexts to be a “gateway to anti-Semitism.”14
Even more controversially, AIPAC’s Republican insurrectionists included Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who refused to cooperate with the committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, who had secretly met with “Stop the Steal” leaders just days before Trump’s attempted coup; and Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, an unashamed fan of white supremacist and antisemitic “replacement theory” conspiracies, and who was known to compare Democratic leaders to the Nazis. AIPAC’s list originally excluded Wyoming representative Elizabeth Cheney, the vociferously “pro-Israel” Republican who had been deemed persona non grata by her party for refusing to embrace its anti-democratic crusade. This decision was later reversed, however, apparently in response to the outcry its exposure inspired.15
When asked by a Washington Post reporter whether there was anything at all “a candidate who supports Israel could support that would rule them out for AIPAC’s support,” Howard Kohr, the organization’s president could not, offhand, come up with a single example. But given that only 4 percent of American Jews, in 2022, put Israel at the top of their list of concerns—and they are divided on the issue—and that the vast majority voted for Joe Biden, and opposed the efforts of Trump and his Republican followers to steal the election and delegitimize the new administration, what AIPAC (with unintended irony) called its “United Democracy Project” clearly undermined its bona fides as a supporter of American democracy. Former AIPAC executive director Tom Dine announced that if the organization he helped build was going to embrace “antidemocratic people who believe the last election was a fraud and they support the January 6 insurrection,” he would “not give them a dime.” Even Abe Foxman expressed the rarest of criticism of the organization with which he had allied the ADL for the nearly three decades he spent at its helm. “Sad mistake!,” Foxman complained in a tweet. “Israel’s security depends on America being a strong democracy.” Together with its continued attacks on President Biden’s attempt to restore US participation in President Obama’s Iran accord, AIPAC’s heavy-handed intervention in the 2022 primaries and general election proved one fact conclusively: Whatever claim AIPAC may have enjoyed as the perceived political representative of the broad Jewish community in the United States had, by this time, clearly become a thing of the past.16
Israel was clearly growing increasingly unpopular among young people in general, among liberals, and among Jews, especially young Jews. Donald Trump, with his typical political sophistication and subtlety, professed to discover, as ex-president, that “the Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel.” He was, for once, only partially wrong. In a survey undertaken by the liberal-leaning Jewish Electorate Institute, 34 percent of American Jews agreed with the statement “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the U.S.,” and fully 22 percent agreed that Israel was committing “genocide.” According to the Pew Research Center’s extensive investigation of Jewish American attitudes undertaken in 2020, the vast majority continued to support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But should that potential solution disappear—as had already very nearly happened—they were roughly evenly divided between ending Israel’s Jewish identity and allowing Israel to formally annex the West Bank. In every one of these categories, young Jews were consistently more critical of Israel than their parents or grandparents were or ever had been.17
Evidence of the intensity of the disaffection can be seen in a May 23, 2021, letter to President Biden signed by more than five hundred “proud alumni” of his presidential campaign. Based both on the names of the signatories and on the composition of Democratic presidential campaign staffs generally, one can safely infer that a large percentage of the signers were Jewish. The letter demanded all manner of changes to US policy in the name of the “pursuit of justice, peace, and self-determination for Palestinians.” They wanted to “ensure U.S. aid no longer funds the imprisonment and torture of Palestinian children, theft and demolition of Palestinian homes and property, and annexation of Palestinian land,” and called on Biden to insist that the Israeli government put an end to the “violent attacks by Israeli mobs that operate with the protection of Israeli police.” They also wanted an end to Israel’s “blockade of Gaza, which has made it an uninhabitable open-air prison,” together with an investigation of “whether Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza violates the Leahy Law, prohibiting U.S. military aid from funding foreign military units implicated in the commission of gross violations of human rights.” As a Jewish campaign alumnus explained at the time, “There’s no question that there are many Jewish staffers on the Hill that are told one version of history growing up but now have a much more evenhanded analysis of the conflict.… We would sing ‘Hatikva’ but not really interrogate how Israel came to be, and there was no real mention of Palestinian people at all.” The harsh criticism of Israel was now coming, as the saying goes, “from inside the house.”18
Critics noticed a spate of novels and short stories by American Jewish writers in which Israelis were portrayed in far less admirable terms than in the past. While Philip Roth had been relatively lonely in painting complicated portraits of often larger-than-life Israeli characters in a series of novels beginning with 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint, major American Jewish writers of the early 21st century including Jonathan Safran Foer (Here I Am), Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union), Nicole Krauss (Forest Dark), Nathan Englander (What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank), and Joshua Cohen (The Netanyahus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Price for Fiction) all had much harsher messages to communicate. This alleged trend led one Tel Aviv-based professor to yearn for the days when Leon Uris’s “heroic and sentimental” 1958 novel, Exodus (adapted two years later into a successful film starring Paul Newman), celebrated the transformation of the Jewish people from subjugation in Europe to emancipation in the Middle East.19
Even more disturbing to American Jewish leaders was the May 19, 2021, letter signed by ninety-three rabbinical and cantorial students representing all denominations save Orthodoxy. It began with the words, “Blood is flowing in the streets of the Holy Land,” and went on to complain that so many Jewish institutions—the very ones with which many of its signatories hoped to soon begin their careers as Jewish leaders and teachers—had been “silent when abuse of power and racist violence erupts in Israel and Palestine.” It then detailed various crimes Israel was committing against the Palestinians, using the term “apartheid” to describe the “two separate legal systems for the same region.” Once a “flying buttress” that “held up the American Jewish community from the outside,” as the veteran Jewish affairs journalist Marc Tracy wrote, in a lengthy New York Times Magazine article that focused on the students’ complaints, Israel was now tearing American Jews apart. The rabbinical and cantorial students’ harsh language proved a particularly ominous harbinger to older Jewish leaders, given the fact that they represented the future not just of the academy, but of American Judaism itself. As one of the signatories quoted by Tracy explained, “there’s an assumption among American Jews that the more people learn about Zionism, the more Zionist they will become.” But, he added, “I think that’s wrong.”20
What’s more, an all but unbridgeable gulf had opened between the political beliefs of Israeli and American Jews. The fact that Israeli voters were significantly more politically conservative in almost every respect than American Jews was consistent with differences in the two groups’ socioeconomic and educational status. But for decades now, the former were moving further and further rightward as the latter remained steadfast in their commitment to political liberalism. According to data compiled in 2022 by the Israel Democracy Institute, fully 62 percent of Israeli Jews now considered themselves to be “right-wing,” with just 24 percent in the center and a mere 11 percent as left-identifying. Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center survey, in 2020, American Jews remained “among the most consistently liberal and Democratic groups in the US population. Seven in ten Jewish adults identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, and half describe their political views as liberal.” This conflict came, increasingly, to encroach on views of issues facing Israel. A 2016 Pew poll found nearly 80 percent agreement among Israeli Jews that they ought to be entitled to privileges over Israeli non-Jews. Nearly 50 percent agreed that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred” from Israel. The latter figure would turn out to be a higher percentage than those favoring a two-state solution, according to a later Pew poll—views that, again, were almost perfectly contradicted by those of the majority of American Jews, with young Jews on either side of the divide further exacerbating the two trends.21
Writing in late 2021, Gil Troy, a McGill University historian and Zionist activist, proposed the term “Identity Zionism” to define Jews who “cherish Israel” and resist the “shrill elite of rabidly anti-Zionist professors, rabbis and activists.” The latter constituted what Troy, writing earlier that year with the Soviet refusenik turned right-wing Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, defined as “Un-Jews,” who complain of “the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people.” Troy specifically mentioned the signatories of the rabbinical and cantorial students’ letter as being in the latter category. These definitions suffer from an obvious inability to account for the likes of the huge ultra-Orthodox, intensely anti-Zionist Satmar sect of Hasidim—whose anti-Zionism is rooted in Masechet Ketubot (111a) in the Talmud, which they believe instructs Jews not to restore Jewish sovereignty until Messianic times—to say nothing of the history of the Jewish people’s proud addiction to limitless disputation. (Once again: “Two Jews, three opinions…”) Even so, by demanding fealty to Israel as a necessary condition of Jewish identity, Troy and Sharansky did articulate the usually unspoken ideological commitment that runs throughout the modern history of secular American Jewish life—redefining, but ultimately restating, what Rabbi Michael Meyer, writing in 1994, described as “the minimal litmus test of [American] Jewish identification.”22
They were, however, fighting a rear-guard and likely losing battle. Ever since the Jewish state’s founding in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and especially since the 1967 war, support for Israel has been the central project of secular American Jewry and the central definitional identity for most American Jews. For many years, this commitment rejuvenated their communities and provided a healthy, unifying theme at a time when theology ceased to matter much and the liberal politics that had replaced it grew ever more divisive. True, Israel’s actions frequently overrode American Jews’ traditional commitment to their liberalism. But the combination of the young Jewish state’s perceived vulnerability, together with the constantly reinforced reification of the Shoah, sustained the unity of a community whose “dovishness stopped at the delicatessen door”—as one wag put it—well into the twenty-first century. Not incidentally, it also helped to ensure not merely Israel’s survival, but its eventual blossoming into an economically dynamic and militarily powerful regional superpower.
At the same time, American Jewish identity, especially in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, became, for the non-Orthodox, vicariously defined with Israel. And that definition had precious little in common with the everyday lives of American Jews. Back in 1971, for instance, a Wheeling, West Virginia, rabbi named Martin Siegel wrote of an experience that was no doubt repeated in temples and synagogues all across post-1967 America. A heavily decorated Israeli colonel came to his synagogue and bragged before a rapturous audience of worshippers about “how many Arabs we had killed, how many tanks we had captured.” The congregants, Siegel observed, “literally bounced with delight in their seats.” It was, he lamented, as if they actually believed that “I, the shoe salesman, killed an Arab; I, the heart specialist, captured a tank.” What remains of Jewish culture and belief beyond Zionism and reverence for those lost in the Shoah has become, at least for the non-Orthodox, increasingly difficult for most Jews to identify with, much less define—which accounts, at least in part, for the commonly stated belief among so many Israeli intellectuals that secular American Judaism is a doomed—and rather ridiculous—phenomenon.23
Jews who lived through the traumatic events of the mid-twentieth century, along with their children and grandchildren, felt the Shoah, the founding of Israel, and the perceived threat of its destruction in the days preceding the Six-Day War to be something that happened to them personally. One can understand their willingness to defend Israel as a kind of miracle of redemption that arose from the ashes of European Jewish civilization. (The Greek origins of the English word “holocaust” itself lay in the “burnt offerings” of ritual animal sacrifice.) They were therefore willing to support, without much questioning, just about anything Israeli leaders said was necessary to assure its security and survival. During the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Elie Wiesel, the eloquent de facto face of Shoah survival, made the point with admirable clarity: “The nations that kept silent during the Holocaust ought to keep silent now as well. The world that then condemned itself by its silence has lost all right to judge Israel now.”24
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Shoah and Israel’s founding had become, for most young American Jews, both ancient and distant matters. Israel’s unquestioning defense made little sense to those whose only experience of Israel was of an increasingly illiberal nation that allied itself with the American right wing, that helps to arm and train the military and intelligence agencies of repressive regimes across the world, and that occupies another people’s land, denies these people even the most basic political rights, and occasionally launches bombing raids against a population forced to live without access to dependable electricity, clean water, and, oftentimes, food and shelter. Rather than the refuge from antisemitism that their parents and grandparents understood a Jewish state to be, young Jews experience Israel as a motivation for attacks on Jews by pro-Palestinian mobs and anti-Israel activists. And finally, many Israelis, including, especially, Israeli political and religious authorities, continue to show virtually no respect for American Jewish religious practice.
In 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre’s book-length essay Anti-Semite and Jew offered the thesis that “the sole tie that binds [one Jew to another] is the hostility and disdain of the societies which surround him.” To the degree that there was ever any truth to this vastly overstated claim, it lost its relevance with the founding of the state of Israel, which gave Jews, both in Israel and the diaspora, a clear purpose: the defense of the state combined with the sanctification of those murdered in the Shoah. Today, however, young American Jews have been voting with their feet—running, not walking, away from the Israel-and-the-Holocaust-grounded Judaism of their parents and grandparents. The 2020 Pew study found that compared to their elders sixty-five years old and up, barely half as many Jews between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine identified with Reform or Conservative Judaism. And Jews who defined themselves as belonging to no denomination or religion have proven unlikely to pass along their Jewish identity to their children, much less their commitment to defending Israel. While older American Jews still told pollsters that they “supported Israel,” fewer than half of Jewish adults under the age of thirty described themselves as even “somewhat” emotionally attached to the Jewish state, and many of those who retained that attachment were strongly opposed to its actions. But of those American Jews who did feel an emotional attachment to Israel, fully 87 percent agreed that one could be both “pro-Israel” and critical of Israeli government policies. A generation earlier, fewer than half of all Jews had held that view. Moreover, 58 percent of American Jews supported restricting military aid to Israel to prevent its use in the occupied territories. Still, this same view, if spoken publicly, would likely result in de facto excommunication from most of the major Jewish organizations that allege to speak on behalf of American Jews.25
American Jews have never been much for synagogue attendance. Barely 20 percent of Jews attend regularly, a figure that would be far lower if we excluded the Orthodox from the calculation. Resources devoted to defending every action undertaken by Israel’s government might instead have been devoted to Jewish education, community service, and the Jewish tradition of social justice known as tikkun olam, all of which have gone begging in recent decades. Clearly a reimagining of what it means to be a diasporic Jew is necessary if the community is to retain even a significant fraction of those drifting away from the faith, much less find a way to grow again. But American Jewish institutions’ relentless focus on—and demands for—fealty to Israel, tied to the Holocaust and antisemitism, are the only cards that mainstream Jewish leaders know how to play, and thus make any such renaissance difficult to imagine. As if harkening back to Sartre, Malcolm Hoenlein, the Conference of Presidents’ executive vice president, explained, in February 2022, that while many people liken the contemporary threat of antisemitism to “1933, 1938”—that is, Hitler’s Holocaust—“it’s not 1938 because of the State of Israel. I think that is the big difference.” But Hoenlein saw a silver lining in the fact that “antisemitism is going to awaken a lot of young people to a sense of community because they feel vulnerable, they feel alone.” The idea that young American Jews might be attracted by a commitment to tikkun olam—while at the center of growth for groups like “Bending the Arc”—held little appeal to Hoenlein and his fellow Conference of Presidents members. In 2022, for instance, the Jewish Federations of North America removed advocacy for gun control, voting rights, and LGBTQ protections from its “Public Priorities” statement. Its top priority: “Jewish communal security and support for Israel.” Not long afterward, the Anti-Defamation League CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, made it clear, point blank, that according to his organization’s definition, “to those who still cling to the idea that antizionism is not antisemitism—let me clarify this for you as clearly as I can—antizionism is antisemitism,” adding, for emphasis, “I will repeat: antizionism is antisemitism.” And while he allowed that, although some groups on the left “might not have armed themselves or engaged in an insurrection designed to topple our government,” they were no less a matter of concern than the violent insurrectionists, owing to the slogans they chanted, the tweets they posted, and the pro-Palestinian speakers they invited to speak on their campuses. This was true, he added, even for Jewish organizations that “attempt[ed] to use their Judaism as a shield.”26
It is a particularly sad commentary on the state of American Jewish leaders’ estimation of their own inner resources that, when panic set in during the early 1990s over the future “continuity” of American Judaism, owing to the threats posed by intermarriage and “distancing,” instead of seeking to find answers internally among their educational, religious, and community organizations, they turned immediately to Israel—and especially to its military—to try to give young Jews a reason to remain in the fold. It is also no accident that by far the largest community investment in this effort has been the nonprofit “Birthright” program, which has now given over seven hundred thousand young American Jews a free trip to Israel, under the watchful guidance of its military, since 1994. This program has reportedly been supported by some $50 billion in donations. But the fact that much of this funding has made its way into the Israeli economy, rather than being put to use by the many desperately underfunded and understaffed institutions serving young Jews in the United States, was understood from the start to be a feature, rather than a bug, of the system its organizers put in place. That its single largest donor has been the funder of both US and Israeli right-wing illiberalism and extremism, Sheldon Adelson, may or may not have played a role in defining the ideological indoctrination its participants receive. But whatever its cause, the belief that Israel can be credibly presented to young people via what a former spokesman for the program described as “the Leon Uris version of Israel’s history”—which is so obviously belied by the reality they see there on the ground—makes it hardly likely that young American Jews will buy what their elders are selling.27
One of the great changes in the larger US debate over Israel in recent times that has helped to fundamentally transform its content has been the Internet-enabled explosion of available information about the region from virtually every ideological perspective. For the first time in the more than eighty-year battle for control of the narrative of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, one can now find just as many journalists covering the Palestinians’ plight as are singing Israel’s praises. In the former’s corner is, among others, the brilliant, merciless reporting of Nathan Thrall—former director of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli Project—which has appeared in the New York Review of Books, New York Times magazine, The Guardian, and elsewhere alongside additional pro-Palestinian essays and reportage. The newly revived Jewish Currents, founded as a Communist Party vehicle during the early Cold War, now provides an independent Jewish anti-Zionist perspective. Its prominence and newfound legitimacy has been buoyed by the presence of former liberal Zionist stalwart Peter Beinart, whose conversion to binationalism sent shockwaves through the communities of many of his former allies. In late 2021, The Nation hired Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian activist from Sheikh Jarrah, giving him the new title of “Palestine reporter,” to add to its staff of almost exclusively pro-Palestinian reporters and columnists. The post–Martin Peretz New Republic also switched sides and began publishing articles with titles such as “Israel’s Never-Ending War Against Palestinian Health.” The liberal American Prospect takes a similarly critical perspective toward Israel. Anchored by the emotional attachments and frequently unmatched eloquence of one of its founders, the liberal philosopher Michael Walzer, the democratic socialist journal Dissent remained a place of enormous sympathy for Israel among its longtime contributors, while its younger editors and writers skewed heavily in the direction of pro-Palestinianism.
Ideological commitment to the Palestinian struggle can now be found among any number of left-wing Internet sites and progressive publications, their on-the-ground reporting combined with exhortatory, often provocative rhetoric. (It should be noted that the writers taking the pro-Palestinian side in the debate on sites like Mondoweiss and The Electronic Intifada are hardly less eager to demonize their opponents than those on the “pro-Israel” side, though none can be said to enjoy even remotely commensurate influence. As New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet testified in 2014, “Just as many critics who say we are biased against Israel, I get just as many emails saying the opposite. I promise you—and just as virulent.”)28
At the same time, the field has also grown ever more crowded on the Jewish right wing. Commentary, cut loose by the American Jewish Committee in December 2006, carries on its tradition of relentless attacks on Israel’s critics, with a particular focus on the alleged apostasies of pro-Palestinian Blacks and liberal Jews. It is now under the direction of John Podhoretz, Norman Podhoretz’s son—or “John P. Normanson,” as he was referred to when in the employ of Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, where his colleagues often read his column aloud to one another in a ritual they termed “Podenfreude.” (His roughly $500,000 2019 remuneration package for a magazine with a mere twenty-four thousand paid subscriptions may be the the highest pay-per-reader compensation ratio in the history of American journalism.) The daily website Tablet takes a similarly aggressive “Pro-Israel” stance. Like The New Republic during the more than thirty years that Martin Peretz owned and edited it (though often embracing some of the wildest Trump-inspired conspiracy theories—it once even published a piece attacking the character of Holocaust survivors), Tablet peppers its assaults on those outside the pro-Israel fold with a smattering of well-regarded critics and independent intellectuals. Its publisher, Nextbook Inc., is generously funded by a member of the board of directors of the extremely Trump-friendly Tikvah Fund, which is chaired by Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law, the one-time Iran/Contra scandal criminal pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, Elliott Abrams. Tikvah also supplied funds for the intellectually oriented Jewish Review of Books, modeled after the New York Review of Books, but with the opposite stance on the Israel/Palestinian conflict. Its magazine, Mosaic, which claims to be “advancing Jewish thought,” is even more hardline.29
These publications were joined on the pro-Israel right wing by the daily newsletter Jewish Insider, as well as a newly reincarnated New York Sun under the same editorship that had found what students were learning at Columbia University in the early 2000s so alarming. The Sun’s funder also paid for the far-right Internet journal Algemeiner, which published a steady stream of right-wing pro-Israel propaganda. SAPIR, yet another new entry in this intellectual category, is a journal edited by the Jewish right-wing New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a relentless Israel partisan. It is funded by an Israel-based foundation, the Maimonides Fund, that does not disclose the identity of its donors (though educated guesses are easily made by those willing to search through the necessary disclosure forms). The issue of a funder’s identity is important for any institution, but in this case, it is especially so, as the Israeli government has in the past committed many millions of dollars in secret to organizations and institutions supportive of Israeli interests, especially in the United States. In doing so, the Israelis are employing a model the CIA used in the 1950s, when it sought to counter Soviet propaganda efforts. The CIA’s hush-money payments to the publishers of intellectual journals were intended to enable those outlets to reach people who were suspicious of more forthright efforts at public diplomacy. As The Forward reported, moreover, many US pro-Israel organizations have shown considerable reluctance to report the contributions they have received, even though the US Foreign Agents Registration Act, originally passed in the 1930s to battle pro-Nazi propaganda efforts, requires that they do so. For the Times to bless such an arrangement, given its editors’ oft-stated concerns with even “the appearance of a conflict of interest,” was unusual to say the least.30
Between these poles are the general-interest sources intended for a Jewish audience, such as the venerable Forward, whose English-language version was reinvented in 1990 and which still manages to publish the Yiddish newspaper it began in 1897. It is joined by the news agency JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, begun in The Hague in 1917); both were mostly pro-Israel but open to harsh criticism, along with the monthly magazine Moment (originally founded by the liberal Zionist Leonard Fein in 1975). These sources augment the English-language version of Haaretz (founded in 1918, making it Israel’s longest-running publication), which was open to far harsher criticism, and, as noted earlier, was unmatched anywhere in its relentless reporting and commentary on both Israeli and Palestinian politics. In addition to these were the Times of Israel (founded in 2012); Israel’s most trafficked news site, Ynet; and a 2021 entry, Sources, a thoughtful journal founded by the Hartman Foundation. What’s more, interested parties could easily find themselves inundated with information from literally dozens of organizations dedicated to spreading news that suited their aims, collated especially for an individual’s interests and delivered via email alerts, Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media, augmented for scholars and other interested parties by a burgeoning collection of academic journals open to virtually all political and intellectual perspectives.*
In other words, for the first time since the debate over Zionism in the United States began, virtually anyone could access a steady stream of reasonably accurate, detailed information about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from multiple ideological and intellectual perspectives. And yet political reality remained largely unchanged. As J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami observed during the May 2021 Gaza war, it may be that “the Democratic Party is clearly now willing and able to speak out in a much more balanced manner about issues related to Israel.” But while the rhetoric was different, the politics were not. For all the criticism Israel received in the wake of the war, opponents could not convince even a tenth of their colleagues in either the House or the Senate to place any meaningful restrictions on the US military aid it received. President Biden, while on a celebratory visit to Israel in July 2022, attributed the entire phenomenon of Democratic dissent over America’s Israel policies as the politically insignificant “mistake” of just “a few” of the party’s members.31
Palestinian supporters succeeded in colonizing university Middle East studies departments, student and faculty organizations, and far-left political organizations and media institutions, but even so, the BDS movement in which they had invested so heavily had virtually no concrete achievements to show for its efforts in terms of genuine boycotts of Israel, whether inside or outside of academia. The movement’s goal of creating sufficient pressure, either on Israel or on a future US government, to demand that Israeli Jews turn their country over to what has apparently already become an Arab majority “between the river and the sea” is not something any sane supporter of Israel ever need worry about. As Israel continues to refuse the Palestinians even a modicum of democracy and human dignity, it will almost certainly continue to grow less and less popular among Democrats, young people, and Jews. But will this change US policy? Nothing in the recent or even distant past—or in the continued stranglehold that money, power, organizational structure, and clearly defined paths to personal career advancement continue to hold over the shape of US foreign policy—leads one to such a conclusion.32
Despite all the deserved criticism that Israeli treatment of the Palestinians has inspired in recent decades, Israel retains the powerful argument that it has no credible “partner” for peace. The Palestinian Authority that rules on the West Bank has sacrificed whatever credibility it once enjoyed among Palestinians owing to decades of corruption, ineffectiveness, and authoritarianism, along with its perceived co-optation by Israeli security services. (It has not faced voters since 2006.) Hamas leaders sometimes make statements indicating that they may one day be open to a discussion of a two-state solution with Israel, but at the same time, as recently as March 2022, it was still celebrating terrorist attacks inside Israel itself. But given the organization’s commitment to a politically charged, fundamentalist brand of Islam, the repression of its opponents, and support for terrorism, almost no one concerned with the survival of the Jewish state would dream of demanding that it accommodate itself to Hamas’s demands—much less dissolve itself, as so many Palestinian supporters claim it must, in order to offer the many millions of Palestinian refugees scattered around the world a literal “right of return.” And while it is also true that Israel bears considerable responsibility for creating the factors that led to this sorry situation, that is hardly an effective—or even responsible—argument for demanding that such risks be undertaken in the foreseeable future. One could, no doubt, find people on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides who, under the proper conditions, could imagine making sufficient concessions to end the conflict and enable realization of the ever-distant “two-state solution,” but such a vision appears each day to be less a realistic goal than an excuse for inaction. According to a March 2022 survey undertaken for the American Jewish Committee, a majority of Israeli millennials agreed that “there is no viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” while fewer than a fifth of American Jews questioned said the same.33
Many people involved in the US political debate on Israel look away from these realities, but, when combined, they give every impression of making any sort of peace impossible for the foreseeable future. As Haim Rabinovich, a twenty-five-year veteran of Israel’s security service, the Shin Bet, who rose to its number three position, put it in a February 2022 interview, “The majority of Israelis don’t want to rule another people. But they are indifferent to this issue. The vast majority of Israelis don’t really experience the control of the Palestinians on an everyday basis.” He called the occupation “not moral, not Jewish, not principled,” before adding, “Do you think the Palestinians will get used to it? That will never happen.”34
Following a failed attempt during the 2021 Gaza war to pause US weapons deliveries to Israel, led by Bernie Sanders in the Senate and members of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “squad” in the House, debate in Congress moved on to a proposal to add $1 billion to the $38 billion in aid that was already assured to Israel—thanks to Barack Obama—to replace the Iron Dome missiles Israel had fired to head off the missiles fired by Hamas during the conflict. The opposition managed only 9 nay votes in the House versus 420 in favor. During the debate over the extra money, Rashida Tlaib attacked Israeli “apartheid,” inspiring a furious reaction from Representative Ted Deutch (D-FL). Deutch announced, “I cannot allow one of my colleagues to stand on the floor on the House of Representatives and label the Jewish democratic state of Israel an apartheid state.… [T]hat’s anti-semitism.” These comments turned out to be a kind of try-out for Deutch’s next job, that of CEO of the American Jewish Committee, which was announced in February 2022.35
But far more than the funding issue at hand, Tlaib had identified the next major battlefield in the debate. Shortly before she spoke, Human Rights Watch had issued a 213-page report (boasting 866 footnotes) following much shorter (unfootnoted) reports by the Jerusalem-based human rights group B’Tselem and a lengthy legal brief by the Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard, published by the Tel Aviv–based group Yesh Din, that found Israel guilty of maintaining “apartheid” in the occupied territories by treating the two ethnic populations there with sharply unequal legal standards. Furthermore, a 2021 survey of qualified Middle East scholars found 65 percent agreement with the statement that Israel now practiced “a one state reality akin to apartheid.” Perhaps most surprising, according to a survey undertaken around the same time by the Democratic-leaning Jewish Electorate Institute, so did 25 percent of American Jews, including 38 percent of those under the age of forty.36
The apartheid argument exploded on the final day of January 2022, just before the venerable London-based human rights organization Amnesty International released a report titled “Crime of Apartheid: The Government of Israel’s Systematic Oppression Against Palestinians.” Four years in the making, the 280-page report (boasting fully 1,559 footnotes) made the case that Israel’s “apartheid” was not restricted to the West Bank but included—and had always included—its treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. In the organization’s judgment, “Jewish Israelis form a group that is unified by a privileged legal status embedded in Israeli law, which extends to them through state services and protections regardless of where they reside in the territories under Israel’s effective control.” Amnesty, moreover, accused Israel of having pursued, since its founding, “a policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis while restricting the rights of Palestinians and preventing Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes.” That policy was extended to the West Bank and Gaza Strip after 1967, Amnesty asserted. Unlike the previous reports, Amnesty International’s was understood by all concerned to be a call to arms. Its purposely incendiary rhetoric was almost certainly designed to inspire others to join the worldwide movement to pressure Israel into ending the special privileges that Jews enjoyed—by virtue of the fact that, as Benjamin Netanyahu put it in March 2019, it was “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people”—up to, and including, dissolving itself, as the BDS movement also suggested.37
The Amnesty report carried significant weight in the debate, owing to the organization’s reputation for accuracy. Many democratic governments, including that of the United States, had relied on the findings laid out in its reports since its 1961 founding. (And it did so even with this report, in its annual “2021 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” released in April 2022.) But because Amnesty officials had circulated the report in advance of its release, and because of its obvious political intent, attacks on the content heralded its arrival. It almost immediately became a kind of propaganda ping-pong ball, hit back and forth between Israel’s die-hard supporters, its attackers, and those caught in the middle. The Israeli government initially tried to convince the organization not to publish it, maintaining that it was “false, biased,” and, of course, “antisemitic.” When those efforts failed, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs called Amnesty “just another radical organization which echoes propaganda, without seriously checking the facts.” The ministry added that the report relied on “lies shared by terrorist organizations.” The Israelis insisted that the allegations endangered Jews the world over—a charge repeated almost word for word by the Anti-Defamation League, which claimed that the report would “likely… lead to intensified antisemitism around the world.” The Conference of Presidents, AIPAC, the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federations of North America, and B’nai B’rith International issued a rare joint statement calling the report an “unbalanced, inaccurate, and incomplete review” that “inexplicably focuse[d] on one aim: to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish and democratic State of Israel.”38
Speaking to an Israeli reporter, Malcolm Hoenlein took credit on behalf of the fifty-three-member Conference of Presidents for “mobilization of all the organizations right away” to contact members of Congress and write “statements that they were encouraged to make” against the report. William Daroff, the group’s CEO, added, “We were engaged in an effort to communicate with key members of Congress, with key members of the Biden administration, with key members of other governments and other NGOs.” Among American officials, the US ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, rejected its findings, as did almost all the senators and members of Congress from both political parties who mentioned it. Nine centrist House Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, issued a statement terming the report to be “baseless,” “biased,” and “steeped in antisemitism.” It was “part of Amnesty’s broad, decades-long campaign,” she said, “to criminalize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state.” Not long after the report’s release, Israel announced that it would not be cooperating with the United Nations’ own investigation into the incidents and practices the Amnesty report had described. Like clockwork, a letter appeared that was signed by sixty-eight senators—thirty-seven Republicans and thirty-one Democrats—asking Secretary of State Antony Blinken to “lead a multinational effort… to end the [United Nations Human Rights Council’s] permanent Commission of Inquiry [COI] on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” terming it to be “the latest endeavor by UNHRC to discredit the only Jewish state” in a manner that would be “likely to further fuel antisemitism worldwide.”39
As we’ve seen, the “anti-Zionism equals antisemitism” equation was by now an old warhorse, as it had long been deployed to shut down criticism—to say nothing of branding virtually all Palestinians as antisemites—without the inconvenience of having to deal with the substance of any given charge. The fact of Amnesty’s 280 pages and 1,559 footnotes can hardly be said to have affected any side’s calculations. Fourteen Israeli human rights organizations—both Jewish and Arab—while not endorsing the details of the report itself, condemned the attacks on Amnesty, also in a rare joint signed statement, writing, “Many of the most pre-eminent scholars of Jewish life, history and persecution have warned that the struggle against antisemitism in the world is being weakened by the unbearable, inaccurate and instrumentalized use to which the antisemitism accusation is lodged for political ends, in order to avoid debate about Israel’s oppressive policies towards the Palestinians.”40
Inside Israel, the word “apartheid” had long ago lost its power. It had been used in Israel’s internal debate at least as early as 2002, sometimes as a warning, other times as a description of current reality. One can find such statements by journalists and politicians of every ideological stripe—including former prime ministers, attorneys general, top military and intelligence officials, opposition leaders, and even the man who, as I write this, holds the office of Israel’s presidency, Isaac Herzog. As recently as December 2021, David Grossman, likely Israel’s most famous living writer, mused, “Maybe it should no longer be called an ‘occupation,’ but there are much harsher names, like ‘apartheid,’ for example.” After the report’s publication, in May 2022, Israel’s High Court of Justice approved the eviction of over a thousand Palestinians from a cluster of villages in the desert frontier area in the South Hebron Hills called “Masafer Yatta” to make way for Israeli military exercises. Haaretz’s editors insisted, “In view of the selective expulsion based on nationality, it will no longer be possible to refute the argument that an apartheid regime has replaced the military occupation in the territories. Occupation is temporary by definition; apartheid is liable to persist forever. The High Court approved it.” (The Israelis did not make their defenders’ task any easier when, shortly thereafter, the IDF apparently killed the beloved Palestinian/American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, during protests immediately following the decision, and then refused to cooperate with all international efforts to investigate the incident, including a request from fifty-seven US Democratic senators and representatives. In a particularly shocking scene broadcast across the world by social and other media, Israeli police were then filmed firing stun grenades at the men who carried her casket and beating them with batons before thousands of mourners who had gathered to pay tribute to her.)41
In Amnesty’s report, as in many others, the accusation of the “crime of apartheid” was tied directly to the definition offered in the 1988 Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court. The statute defined apartheid in terms of “inhumane acts” undertaken “in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” As precious few people actually read the Amnesty report—or the Rome Statute, or any of the other “apartheid” reports—almost no one understood the word’s legal meaning in the context in which it was being used. Therefore, pretty much every argument about Israeli “apartheid” turned on the degree to which Israel’s treatment of its Arab population, whether in the occupied territories or in Israel proper, could be fairly equated with Afrikaners’ treatment of South African Blacks—with which most people associated the term. In The Nation, BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti, writing with the Jewish Voice for Peace executive director Stefanie Fox, asked, in one headline, “Is This Israel’s South Africa Moment?” Shortly after the report’s release, one could find fully six attacks in the Wall Street Journal published in the previous ten days. Most made reference to South Africa and insisted—with the Israeli government and mainstream American Jewish organizations—that even to raise the notion of such a comparison was to evince, or at least exploit, antisemitism.42
American “liberal Zionist” organizations—that is, those who represent the views of roughly half of American Jews—found themselves, per usual, caught in the middle. Understanding the word’s power in the US debate and its association with South Africa, groups such as J Street, Ameinu, T’ruah, Americans for Peace Now, Partners for Progressive Israel, and New York Jewish Agenda took a nuanced position distancing themselves from the word “apartheid,” especially as applied to pre-1967 Israel, while trying to shift the debate to the details that Amnesty had uncovered, in the hopes of convincing American—and even perhaps Israeli—Jews to take the criticisms seriously.43
Interestingly, the only major player in the media to refuse to engage with the Amnesty report at all was the Israel debate’s most important and influential forum, the New York Times. Its reaction was complete silence, as if no such report had appeared. Even after the report had inspired vociferous responses from the Israeli government, from the US government, and from “pro-Israel” groups, “pro-peace” groups, “pro-Palestinian” groups, and other human rights organizations, along with members of Congress, senators, and countless local elected officials across America, anyone who relied on the Times as their most trusted news source when it came to Israel—a population, it may be assumed, heavily populated by American Jews—would never have heard of the report at all. A Times spokesman responded to a query about this with the explanation that the paper had “covered the debate over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, both the accusations by rights groups that Israel practices apartheid as well as with on-the-ground reporting of the underlying conditions that give rise to these arguments. While it is not our practice to cover every report published by NGOs, these issues have been and will continue to be an essential part of our Mideast coverage.” (At the time, the Times had already run four of the five stories it would eventually publish on the issues raised by comments made by the comedian Whoopi Goldberg about the Holocaust on the television chitchat program The View.) America’s “paper of record” did, eventually, reverse itself and decide to cover the report after all, fully fifty-five days after its release had been reported, and then only in a decidedly pro forma piece, buried deep inside the day’s news, and with no discussion of the enormous controversy its publication had caused. It was as if the news were simply too painful to be dealt with by America’s most important and influential news organization on all matters, but most especially when it came to Israel and American Jews.44
The much-admired essayist and novelist Joan Didion once observed that while the “question of the US relationship with Israel” was discussed with “considerable intellectual subtlety in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,” this was not so in the United States. “In New York and Washington and in those academic venues where the attitudes and apprehensions of New York and Washington have taken hold,” she said, the topic turned evenings “toxic.” The issue of Israel had become “unraisable, potentially lethal, the conversational equivalent of an unclaimed bag on a bus. We take cover. We wait for the entire subject to be defused, safely insulated behind baffles of invective and counter-invective. Many opinions are expressed. Few are allowed to develop. Even fewer change.”45
Didion was inspired at the time by a statement by Harvard University president and former secretary of the treasury Lawrence Summers, whom she quoted as saying that “criticisms of the current government of Israel could be construed as ‘anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.’” She was speaking to an audience at the New York Public Library in late 2002, but her statement would have been just as relevant had she made it fifty years earlier or twenty years later. In this book, I have tried to tell the story of why that is, and why it matters, not just for Israel and for American Jews, but for the sake of civil discourse upon which all hopes for democracy must finally rest.46
* I should note that among the publications mentioned, I have been, during the course of my career, a columnist for The Nation (for twenty-five years), The Guardian, The Forward, Moment, and The American Prospect. I have also been a frequent contributor to Haaretz and an occasional contributor to The New Republic during the decades of Martin Peretz’s ownership.