Why are American Jews so shocked by Israel’s far-right turn?
JVL Introduction
In an insightful essay reposted below, Professor of Jewish Studies Shaul Magid offers some pointers to help us understand the tremors shaking Jewish communities in the States today, almost irrationally stunned by Israel’s rightward turn.
America’s generally liberal Zionism was built on the premise that liberal values in the United States and the settlement of Jews in Palestine were much the same thing, that there was nothing more American than support for Israel and its liberal democratic values.
So too the sense of what it is to be Jewish that emerged from the liberal and rational aspects of the C18th Jewish enlightenment is under strain. The apocalyptic element in traditional Jewish thought, suppressed as marginal, irrational, backward-looking, is back with a vengeance.
For decades the growing disconnections have been visible but could largely be ignored as temporary aberrations. The in-your-face racism and messianic fervour of the current Israeli regime rules out denial as an option for liberal Jews.
Furthermore, this comes at a time when antisemitism is on the rise in the States. Israel was always the answer to that fear. It is no longer.
It is no wonder that so many US Jews feel bereft.
This article was originally published by +972 Magazine on Thu 25 May 2023. Read the original here.
Why are American Jews so shocked by Israel’s far-right turn?
Israel’s electorate is forcing U.S. Jews to grapple with the dissonance not only between liberal values and Zionism, but their understandings of Judaism itself.
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What an interesting article. Thank you.
Shaul Magid’s analysis is always terrific. So glad JVL is bringing more of it to UK readers. I am sharing this widely.
[This contains edited extracts, attempting to maintain the gist, of a near-thousand-word comment submitted – JVL web editor]
There is so much wrong with Magid’s article that it is difficult to know where to begin.
Zionism was not a movement of Jewish self-determination… Zionism was a Christian idea adopted by the Jewish petit-bourgeoisie in the wake of the Russian pogroms of the late 19th century.
Zionism was seen by most European Jews as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. When Herzl proposed holding the First Zionist Congress it was going to be in Munich. Except that Munich’s Jews rose up in revolt and the Congress was transferred to Basel, Switzerland…
Magid’s homage to ‘a strong, humanistic left, driven in part by the kibbutz movement and socialist ideology’ says much about his failure to understand Labour Zionism and its role in instigating the Nakba and subsequent ethnic cleansing in the 1950s.
Any serious study of Labour Zionism would start with Ze’ev Sternhell’s Founding Myths of Israel rather than perpetuating this myth of a Zionist socialism. It is little wonder that Magid fails to mention the key role of the left of Labour Zionism – Tabenkin, Yisrael Galili and Yigal Allon – in the formation of Gush Emunim and the Greater Israel Movement.
There are repeated references to the ‘demise of Israel’s socialist ethos’ and ‘the old socialist country of the past’ which indicates either total ignorance by Magid of what pre-1967 Israel was actually like or just plain simple racism.
The settlement of the West Bank, initiated by the Labour Zionist government, led inevitably to the growth of Jewish messianism and apocalyptic Judaism but this wasn’t absent from pre-1967 Zionism either. Jewish messianism is the ideological rationale for the colonisation of the biblical land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael)…
All the nonsense about Jewish apocalyptism and mysticism lacks any materialist analysis of the history of the Jewish diaspora. It is simply a fact that Jewish ethno-centrism as a facet of medieval Judaism, was fast disappearing… Israel Shahak’s … Jewish History Jewish Religion understood how the religion had changed as the Jewish people changed. It places all Magid’s nonsense in perspective.