Breaking Up
When you’re in a relationship where your sweetheart dumps you, most of the time you’d be smart to cut your losses and move on. There’s nothing you can do to rekindle the flame. Rejection hurts, but worse is clinging to the delusion that doing something different, changing how you act and who you are, will make that person come back to you.
That situation about sums up where liberal-leaning Jews and friends are in their fast-fading romance with Progressivism. It has cast us aside in favor of antizionists. If we think that becoming antizionist ourselves will make progressives reconsider and could win back their affection, we’re kidding ourselves, and yet many Jews and their friends are trying to do just that.
Although antizionism is sweeping gullible souls - adolescents and grownups with an adolescent mentality - off their feet in universities and town councils throughout the West, here in Zikhron Yaakov I detect that folks couldn’t care less about having been spurned so rudely. Israel’s political culture was originally progressive - political leadership Labor Zionist, with ties to democratic socialists, and left-wing nostalgia still lingering - but has long since moved on.1
The subject of antizionism is barely a blip on Israelis’ emotional radar screen. We’re not trying - as jilted lovers sometimes do - to get back into Progressivism’s graces by imitating the rival who supplanted us.
I am looking out my window at the flag of Israel, which we fastened to the railing of our mirpeset/balcony, waving nobly in the breeze. They’re visible everyone one goes. Walking along the sidewalks, I’ve noticed protest signs on walls and fences, but their messages, too, are patriotic.
The criticism, different from what one sees on banners hoisted aloft in marches in London and New York, reflects objection not to Israel’s existence but to policies and practices viewed - from assorted partisan and non-partisan perspectives - as endangering it.
Conversations with friends and neighbors inevitably circle back to the question of how to improve the country, not how to deep-six it. When discussing what approach to take toward Palestinians, even Israeli left-wingers who entertain the “one-state solution” notion honestly concede that it’s a pipe-dream. Pretty much everybody assumes Israel as a Jewish state is here to stay.
The question is, what kind of Jewish state should it be: democratic, theocratic, authoritarian? Grappling with that problem is where disagreement heats up, often boiling into acrimony.
Unlike Jews in cities throughout Western Europe and, increasingly, the U.S., Jews in Israel do not nervously tuck their stars of David under their shirts or remove kippot and other Jewishly identified clothing that could make us hate crime targets. Synagogues are not barricaded or equipped with armed guards. There’s no reason to worry that looking Jewish could mark you for harassment or worse.
Guards stationed at supermarket and school entrances monitor the potential terrorism threat (a throwback precaution to when waves of intifada traumatized the Israeli public some decades ago), but these days such security protocol is casual, seemingly perfunctory.
Because Israel has never not been at war with at least some of its neighbors, the present being no exception, many citizens also take a kacha-kacha/so-so attitude toward missile and drone attacks. During the latest round of hostilities, we sheltered in the safe room together with other apartment-dwellers on our landing, exchanged greetings and chatted, musing on the absurdity of what was going on, wondering when things would calm down.
In the north they haven’t. There’s anger aplenty especially among those who’ve been harmed there and elsewhere from attacks by Iran and Hezbollah. Once again, the indignation stems not from a wish, which Israel’s enemies fanatically embrace, to erase it from the map but from loyal citizens’ frustration with Israel’s government at not safeguarding them as it should.2
Protest is based on an assumption not of hostility against but of devotion to medinat yisrael.
Criticism informed by knowledge based on one’s lived experience with conflict is valid; armchair lectures of rebuke broadcast from halfway across the world, at a safe distance from the arena of conflict, are not. (One reason I decided to make aliyah was that I realized I could not in good faith judge how Israel should respond to difficult options with which it is faced in military, political and cultural terms unless I had skin in the game.)
Antizionist orthodoxy now dominates progressive politics in places far from where the Jewish people’s collective existence is on the line. Diaspora Jews who think humoring that unconscionable derangement will induce their ex to reconsider and come back to them are fooling themselves.
Jews and their friends should instead categorically reject antizionism and all the excuses individuals who’re prey to the antizionist disinformation campaign make for it. One modest step is to sign this declaration that Dr. Naya Lekht authored: https://www.stopaz.org/declaration .
And share it with others. Also, listen to an illuminating podcast she did with Steven Shalowitz on IsraelCast at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovxx4aHcJO0 .
The late great Jewish songwriting team Neil Sedaka (a proud supporter of Israel!) and Howard Greenfield wrote the classic hit “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” A teenage boy begs his girlfriend not to end their romance. Pleading wistfully, futilely, he reminds her of all the good times they had together. Jews and progressives had their good times, but the relationship soured as progressives broke up with us and took up with antizionists.
We should accept that fact - stop pretending we can fix a broken relationship - and move on.
(“Faithful to the Scroll [Declaration] of Independence”)
see: https://momentmag.com/democratic-socialists-of-america-anti-israel/