Repairing the Rift on Israel and Antisemitism

The New York City mayoral election exacerbated rifts in the Jewish community that have been developing for years, especially since October 7, including the difference between criticism of Israel and antisemitism and criticism of Zionism and antisemitism.

Many younger Americans, and many younger Jews, distinguish between antisemitism (hatred of Jews) and criticism of Israel and of Zionism. That’s why they don’t see a contradiction between vowing to fight antisemitism and delivering harsh, offensive, or unfair criticism of Israel.

Some of us, understandably, cannot make that distinction. We consider Israel part of our identity, and we take criticism of Israel or Zionism as attacks against us. 

As we learn more about Israel’s activities in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the violence committed by both sides in the armed conflicts leading to Israel’s independence, we do all we can to assign blame to the Palestinians and rationalize Israel’s actions–anything to avoid admitting that the state we love is imperfect, sometimes tragically imperfect.

We don’t want to feel guilty for loving Israel. Because we have never learned to love the real Israel, we invent an Israel that never existed except in the pages of Leon Uris’s Exodus to love, and we search for evidence to confirm the fable while discounting evidence that might break the myth.

The problem is that other people don’t see that Israel. They see the real Israel. If we are unwilling or unable to defend the real Israel, we become unwitting accomplices in the world’s malignment of Israel, which we then interpret as antisemitism.

These emotions and feelings are real, sincerely held, and cannot be dismissed lightly. To make matters more complicated, antisemitism does drive some criticism and hatred of Israel, and when it does, it must be condemned.

Ideas that some see as anti-Zionism are sometimes ideas enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, such as ensuring “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” If that’s the one state the founders of Israel envisioned, then why, some wonder, is it anti-Israel or antisemitic to hold Israel to that standard?

I am a Zionist. I recognize that sometimes anti-Zionism bleeds into antisemitism. Sometimes it doesn’t. The Nexus Project has a guide to help you recognize the difference.

Different generations view the world through different prisms, which influence how they frame current events. The Washington Post cited Dov Waxman’s explanation that “older generations, with a more visceral sense of the Holocaust, tend to see Israel as a vital refuge for the Jews, and see its story as one of a people returning to safety in their homeland after living for 2,000 years as a scattered diaspora facing persistent persecution.”

Rabbi Sharon Brous explained that the generations that remember 1973 and 1967 see Israel as David against Goliath. They see Israel as a vulnerable country always on the verge of annihilation. The October 7 attack proved again for them that Israel could be wiped out in an instant and that Israel’s Arab neighbors will never stop trying–and one day, might succeed (put aside that Hamas at its strongest was never an existential threat to Israel).

The next generation sees Israel as a military power that repeatedly stretches out its hand in peace, only to be rebuffed. Their Israel is the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and even Ariel Sharon when he was prime minister, an Israel led by powerful warriors turned peacemakers who might have succeeded in making peace were it not for the intransigence of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians’ refusal to compromise. Israel’s current government, to this generation, is an aberration, much as Trump is an aberration in the United States (we hope).

But as Waxman explained, “By the time millennials began forming their understanding of global events, the violence of the second Intifada had concluded in the mid-2000s with enhanced walls and barriers constructed between Israel and the West Bank, and then Gaza. This generation formed its idea of Israel from reports of Palestinians denied access to water, freedom of movement and fair trials, under the military control of what was by then a relatively rich, nuclear-armed power.”

The under-30ish generation sees Israel as a military power that does not want peace and whose goal is an undemocratic Greater Israel from the river to the sea, an Israel that has no desire for a two-state solution and is building more settlements and condoning settler terrorism in the West Bank to set the stage for de facto, if not de jure, annexation.

Rabbi Irwin Kula writes that this generation evaluates “Israeli policy using the same standards applied to other democracies and their support for Israel is often conditional, not tribal. For this generation, conflating anti-Zionism or pro-Palestinian protests with antisemitism feels manipulative and politically expedient.”

Israel has ruled the West Bank for all of their lives. Israel has been governed by a right-wing coalition, mostly led by Benjamin Netanyahu, for nearly all of their lives. The racists, bigots, and extremists in Israel’s current government are to them the norm, not the exception. 

If you are in the oldest or maybe the middle group, you think it’s absurd that Israel is accused of apartheid: In the Israel you know, which does not include the West Bank, Palestinians have equal rights. They can vote, hold seats in the Knesset, and serve in the judiciary. 

If you are in the youngest or maybe the middle group, accusations of apartheid make more sense: Palestinians in the West Bank do not have equal rights. They live under a different legal system from Jews who live in the West Bank: They cannot vote in Knesset elections, let alone hold seats in the Knesset. They cannot serve in the judiciary.

We don’t do Israel any favors when we blur the distinction between Israel and the West Bank. A bill proposed in New York would target tax-exempt charities that provide money to Israeli settler organizations. Maybe it’s a good idea, maybe it’s a bad idea, but that bill does not target Israel because settlements in the West Bank are not part of Israel. Acting as if the West Bank is part of Israel lends credence to the argument that Israel is guilty of apartheid.

The younger generation shares our values. We taught them well. We taught them to love the stranger. We taught them to love their neighbors as themselves. They see an Israel that is not living up to the values we taught them. Hillel asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be?” The oldest group sees a weak Israel, isolated and alone in the world, and sometimes forgets Hillel’s second question: “If I am only for myself, what am I?”

For the oldest group, you only get to the second question if you answer the first question–you can’t look out for others if you are dead. The youngest group sees a powerful Israel that can look out for itself and is oppressing instead of supporting others. 

These issues come to a head in college because Jewish education fails to prepare kids for college. The answer is not more right-wing indoctrination from K-12. That’s the problem. The answer is to teach our kids to love the real Israel, flaws and all. If we don’t, they’ll learn what we haven’t taught them before college from people who, to put it mildly, are not sympathetic to Israel’s cause. They’ll question everything we taught them, whether right or wrong, because they are hearing for the first time what we should have taught them and helped them to understand.

On some college campuses and among some young adults, Jewish and non-Jewish, the Israel debate is not about 1967 and the occupation but 1949 and whether Israel should exist at all. Some young adults are unprepared for this debate because the Israel they learned about before college was a simplistic, sanitized version of Israel’s history that their parents and teachers did not recognize as myth. When they are exposed to the hard facts about Israel, they either engage in denial, disengage, or not having learned how to love Israel despite its imperfections, go to the other extreme and question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Yet rather than loving the real Israel, some pro-Israel groups want Israel portrayed as fantasy rather than reality and are doing more harm than they realize. As Chemi Shalev wrote, “One of the main reasons for the growing disillusionment of American Jews, especially the younger generation, is the unbearable discrepancy between the idyllic Israel they were sold and their realization of reality on the ground.” 

The kids on campus who complain the most about antisemitism are often the kids who were sold this fantasy and lack the tools to respond to criticism of the real Israel.

We cannot assign Tom Segev or other historians who write about the real Israel to third-graders. But Dr. Alex Sinclair, in Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism, argues that we should never teach myths. We can teach even young kids that there were Palestinians in the area when Jews, mainly from Europe, attempted to reclaim the land, and as we teach the Jewish narrative, we can begin to teach that it conflicted with another narrative.

Instead of ignoring what reputable historians found in Israel’s archives, we can put this part of Israel’s history in context for our kids so that it does not hit them like a tsunami in college and beyond. We will not need to deal with busted myths if we don’t teach them in the first place. Instead of giving our kids simplistic talking points, we should treat Israel’s history with the same respect we treat other academic disciplines. 

The question then becomes how to address claims that because Israel’s creation involved displacement and murder of Palestinians, sometimes intentionally, sometimes violently, Israel is not a legitimate state. The answer is not to deny the facts but to explain that every nation is founded in violence and that every national movement, including the Palestinian movement, is almost by definition an ethnic nationalist movement. 

The answer is not to deny the Jewish or Palestinian nationalist narrative, but to recognize that Jews and Palestinians each have the right to self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland. The problem is that Jews and Palestinians share the same homeland–hence the necessity of a two-state solution.

The answer to those who deny the Jewish right to self-determination is to engage–to ask why they think that Palestinians have a right to self-determination but Jews do not, and to go from there. Depriving either people of their homeland is an injustice. 

In the end, as Amos Oz said in 2013, “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash of right and right. Tragedies are resolved in one of two ways: The Shakespearean way or the Anton Chekhov way. In a tragedy by Shakespeare, the stage at the end is littered with dead bodies. In a tragedy by Chekhov everyone is unhappy, bitter, disillusioned and melancholy but they are alive. My colleagues in the peace movement and I are working for a Chekhovian not a Shakespearean conclusion.” In other words, two states for two peoples.

Oz explained that there cannot be one state because Israelis and Palestinians cannot yet become one happy family (“they are not one and they are not happy.”) Centuries of persecution have taught Jews that they need a state where they are masters of their destiny. The issue is not safety per se; the issue is the ability to do something about it.

It is tempting to argue that the younger generation sees things as they are and the older generation sees things as they were. It is tempting to argue that the older generation has perspective that the younger generation lacks.

Kula concludes that “the task now is not to force consensus — whether around antisemitism or Israel — but to create containment — to hold space for multiple truths. A future-oriented American Jewish politics must be emotionally mature, morally courageous, and psychically flexible. We must cultivate spaces where dissent is not betrayal, trauma is not weaponized, and power is not above moral scrutiny.”

Perhaps we can begin to repair the rift by doing at least that.

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