A Rift has Developed Between American Jews and Israel

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

U.S. President Donald Trump remarked on Aug. 21 that Jewish Americans who vote for Democratic Party candidates are “very disloyal to Israel,” citing the views of Democratic Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Both are fierce critics of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.

All this has caused an uproar in the American Jewish community. Most American Jews are liberal Democrats, and vehemently oppose Trump, who, to their consternation, is favoured by most Israelis.

Relations between Israel and American Jews have seen their ups and downs over the years. The more complicated Israel becomes, the harder it is for U.S. Jews to understand it – and sometimes, to support it.

After Israel was established in 1948, a formula for relations with American Jewry was determined when David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, struck a deal with Jacob Blaustein, head of the influential American Jewish Committee.

At an August 1950 meeting to discuss the Israeli position vis-à-vis American Jewry, Ben-Gurion laid out the following guidelines: Israel wanted U.S. Jewry to continue to exist safely and to flourish; did not see itself as allowed to interfere in its affairs; saw it as an equal partner in caring for persecuted Jews in the world, especially after the Holocaust; and did not consider it a Jewish population in distress.

Israel would also refrain from activity urging American Jews to emigrate to the new Jewish state.

American Jews, who then numbered five or six million people, were strong and wealthy compared to the Jewish state, which at the time was home to a little over a million and surrounded by hostile neighbours. American Jews were crucial in raising funds for the beleaguered new nation.

Weaned on stories of the early Zionist pioneers from Europe who built the country, American Jews today sometimes forget that Israel is in the Middle East. Half its people came from the Muslim world, and this accounts for much of its culture, from cuisine and music to behaviour and politics.

The Middle East is a cauldron of animosity -- religious, ethnic, and ideological. The latest manifestations are the conflicts that emerged in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Israelis with roots in the Islamic world always knew this. In general, they were skeptical about the possibilities of rapprochement and peace with these neighbours.

Israel no longer conforms to its founders’ ideals of socialism and secularism, explained journalist David Horovitz in an interview with the Times of Israel in July. “It rests on a bedrock of Jewish identity that has a lot to do with people who came here from Baghdad, Aleppo and Casablanca.”

Ben-Gurion assumed the Jewish state would be the focal point for global Jewish unity. But equally importantly, Hebrew would serve to bind together Israeli and American Jews.

Yet today, one half of the Jewish world not only lives beyond Israel’s borders; it also mostly lives in English. Only 13 per cent of American Jews understand some Hebrew; half don’t even know the alphabet. This too impacts Israel-diaspora relations.

A majority of the world’s Jews now live in the Jewish state, while a comfortable American Jewish community is not leaving the diaspora. The cultural, intellectual, political and religious divide is bound to widen.