OPINION
NICHOLAS
KRISTOF
The ‘Unshakable’ Bonds of Friendship With Israel
Are Shaking
May 19,
2021
By Nicholas
Kristof
Opinion
Columnist
If you oppose war crimes only by your enemies, it’s
not clear that you actually oppose war crimes.
That’s a
thought worth wrestling with as many experts suggest that both Hamas and Israel
are engaging in crimes of war in the current Gaza conflict. For the same reason
that we deplore Hamas’s shelling of Israel, shouldn’t we also demand that Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accept a cease-fire and stop bombings
that kill far greater numbers of innocents?
The United
States was the first country to recognize Israel upon its founding in 1948, and
one of the few things that Democrats and Republicans have mostly agreed on over
the decades is unwavering support for Israel.
“The deep
bonds of friendship between the U.S. and Israel remain as strong and unshakable
as ever,” President Barack Obama wrote soon after taking office.
Yet today,
especially within the Democratic Party, those bonds are shaking as Netanyahu
resists a cease-fire in Gaza. He leaves us wondering: Why should our tax
dollars subsidize a rain of destruction that has killed scores of children,
damaged 17 hospitals and clinics and forced 72,000 people to flee their homes?
President
Biden has blocked the United Nations Security Council from calling for a
cease-fire. He apparently believes that he can accomplish more with private
diplomacy than with public rebukes. “Progress occurs in the Middle East when
everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel,”
Biden said in 2010.
Alas, it’s
difficult to spot this “progress.” Netanyahu has used American cover to expand
settlements and pretty much destroy any hope of a two-state solution. He has
winked at domestic extremism, so that at least 100 new WhatsApp groups in
Israel (with names like “Death to Arabs”) encourage violence against
Palestinians. And now he is bombing Gaza and igniting street fighting that
President Reuven Rivlin of Israel has called a “civil war.”
Some
progress! Some young Americans see the rise of this hawkish, more extremist
Israel and perceive not a plucky democracy but an oppressive military power.
What strikes them most isn’t democratic values so much as what Human Rights
Watch calls “crimes of apartheid.” Netanyahu also undermined bipartisan
American support for Israel by undercutting Democrats like Obama and aligning
himself at the hip with Donald Trump and America’s right wing.
Many of us
admire a great deal about Israel. At home it has a robust democracy that gives
more rights to Arab citizens than its neighbors do: Thank God Israel treats its
Arab citizens better than Egypt, Syria or Saudi Arabia treat their Arab
citizens.
Yet there’s
also the other Israel that systematically discriminates against Palestinians in
the occupied territories and seems to think it can indefinitely control them
and grab their land and water without giving them voting rights.
Defenders
of Israel’s policy in Gaza note that Israel sometimes warns people before
destroying their buildings, that Israel, in contrast to Hamas, is not trying to
kill as many civilians as possible, and that Hamas often locates military sites
in civilian areas in ways that make collateral damage more likely. All true.
But America should aspire to have allies with a higher moral standard than
“better than Hamas.”
It’s also
troubling that while the destruction of Gaza helps Netanyahu politically, it doesn’t
seem to have any strategic purpose. Indeed, it arguably helps Hamas.
“This is
Israel’s most failed and pointless Gaza operation ever,” wrote Aluf Benn, the
editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
So bravo to
Senators Bernie Sanders and Jon Ossoff for showing leadership in Congress by
standing up to Netanyahu. It’s notable that both men are Jewish, for today the
strongest supporters of Netanyahu’s hard-line policies are not American Jews
but white evangelical Christians. A Pew survey last year found that fewer than
one-third of young Jews in the United States rated Netanyahu as good or
excellent, and barely one-quarter strongly opposed the B.D.S. movement to
boycott Israel.
In a recent
column, I asked why giving $3.8 billion a year in military assistance to a rich
country like Israel is the best use of that money, instead of, say, vaccinating
people in poor countries against Covid-19.
I braced
myself for a torrent of criticism. There was some, much of it making legitimate
counterpoints. But what struck me was how many people simply agreed with me in
a way that would never have been true a decade ago.
One last
thing: Suggesting that the United States condition aid to Israel inevitably
provokes charges of anti-Semitism, so let’s be cleareyed.
Anti-Semitism
is a genuine concern and no doubt infuses some denunciations of Israel. But it
cheapens the authentic struggle against anti-Semitism to fling such charges
lightly. Just as anti-Semites shouldn’t use this conflict to promote hate,
supporters of Israel shouldn’t use anti-Semitism as a screen to hide actions
from honest criticism.
It isn’t
Islamophobic to denounce Iran’s nuclear program. It’s not anti-Christian to
reproach President Donald Trump for condoning white nationalism. And it’s not
anti-Semitic to criticize Israel for possible war crimes.
Nicholas
Kristof has been a columnist for The Times since 2001. He has won two Pulitzer
Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur. You can sign
up for his free, twice-weekly email newsletter and follow him on Instagram. His
latest book is "Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope." @NickKristof
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The Gaza Conflict Is Stoking an ‘Identity Crisis’
for Some Young American Jews
A new generation is confronting the region’s
longstanding conflict in a very different context, with very different
pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
By
Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham
May 19,
2021
Dan
Kleinman does not know quite how to feel.
As a child
in Brooklyn he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere,
the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got
bad, he said.
It was a
refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., chanted
“Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a
“South Park” episode to steal his “Jew gold.”
But his
feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he
watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help
the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears
someone make anti-Israel statements.
“It is an
identity crisis,” Mr. Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is
happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and
weird.”
As the
violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing
across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s
longstanding strife in a very different context, with very different pressures,
from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
The Israel
of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under
constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests
across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial
and social justice. The pro-Palestinian position has become more common, with
prominent progressive members of Congress offering impassioned speeches in
defense of the Palestinians on the House floor. At the same time, reports of
anti-Semitism are rising across the country.
Divides
between some American Jews and Israel’s right-wing government have been growing
for more than a decade, but under the Trump administration those fractures that
many hoped would heal became a crevasse. Politics in Israel have also remained
fraught, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-tenured government forged
allegiances with Washington. For young people who came of age during the Trump
years, political polarization over the issue only deepened.
Many Jews
in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still,
the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both
the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home.
What is at stake is not just geopolitical, but deeply personal. Fractures are
intensifying along lines of age, observance and partisan affiliation.
In suburban
Livingston, N.J., Meara Ashtivker, 38, has been afraid for her father-in-law in
Israel, who has a disability and is not able to rush to the stairwell to shelter
when he hears the air-raid sirens. She is also scared as she sees people in her
progressive circles suddenly seem anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, she said.
Ms.
Ashtivker, whose husband is Israeli, said she loved and supported Israel, even
when she did not always agree with the government and its actions.
“It’s
really hard being an American Jew right now,” she said. “It is exhausting and
scary.”
Some young,
liberal Jewish activists have found common cause with Black Lives Matter, which
explicitly advocates for Palestinian liberation, concerning others who see that
allegiance as anti-Semitic.
The recent
turmoil is the first major outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza for which
Aviva Davis, who graduated this spring from Brandeis University, has been
“socially conscious.”
“I’m on a
search for the truth, but what’s the truth when everyone has a different way of
looking at things?” Ms. Davis said.
Alyssa
Rubin, 26, who volunteers in Boston with IfNotNow, a network of Jewish
activists who want to end Jewish American support for Israeli occupation, has
found protesting for the Palestinian cause to be its own form of religious
observance.
She said
she and her 89-year-old grandfather ultimately both want the same thing, Jewish
safety. But “he is really entrenched in this narrative that the only way we can
be safe is by having a country,” she said, while her generation has seen that
“the inequality has become more exacerbated.”
In the
protest movements last summer, “a whole new wave of people were really primed
to see the connection and understand racism more explicitly,” she said,
“understanding the ways racism plays out here, and then looking at Israel/Palestine
and realizing it is the exact same system.”
But that
comparison is exactly what worries many other American Jews, who say the
history of white American slaveholders is not the correct frame for viewing the
Israeli government or the global Jewish experience of oppression.
At Temple
Concord, a Reform synagogue in Syracuse, N.Y., teenager after teenager started
calling Rabbi Daniel Fellman last week, wondering how to process seeing Black
Lives Matter activists they marched with last summer attack Israel as “an
apartheid state.”
“The
reaction today is different because of what has occurred with the past year,
year and a half, here,” Rabbi Fellman said. “As a Jewish community, we are
looking at it through slightly different eyes.”
Nearby at
Sha’arei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, teenagers were reflecting on
their visits to Israel and on their family in the region.
“They see
it as Hamas being a terrorist organization that is shooting missiles onto
civilian areas,” Rabbi Evan Shore said. “They can’t understand why the world
seems to be supporting terrorism over Israel.”
In
Colorado, a high school senior at Denver Jewish Day School said he was
frustrated at the lack of nuance in the public conversation. When his social
media apps filled with pro-Palestinian memes last week, slogans like “From the
river to the sea” and “Zionism is a call for an apartheid state,” he
deactivated his accounts.
“The
conversation is so unproductive, and so aggressive, that it really stresses you
out,” Jonas Rosenthal, 18, said. “I don’t think that using that message is helpful
for convincing the Israelis to stop bombing Gaza.”
Compared
with their elders, younger American Jews are overrepresented on the ends of the
religious affiliation spectrum: a higher share are secular, and a higher share
are Orthodox.
Ari Hart,
39, an Orthodox rabbi in Skokie, Ill., has accepted the fact that his Zionism
makes him unwelcome in some activist spaces where he would otherwise be
comfortable. College students in his congregation are awakening to that same
tension, he said. “You go to a college campus and want to get involved in
antiracism or social justice work, but if you support the state of Israel,
you’re the problem,” he said.
Rabbi Hart
sees increasing skepticism in liberal Jewish circles over Israel’s right to
exist. “This is a generation who are very moved and inspired by social justice
causes and want to be on the right side of justice,” Rabbi Hart said. “But
they’re falling into overly simplistic narratives, and narratives driven by
true enemies of the Jewish people.”
Overall,
younger American Jews are less attached to Israel than older generations: About
half of Jewish adults under 30 describe themselves as emotionally connected to
Israel, compared with about two-thirds of Jews over age 64, according to a
major survey published last week by the Pew Research Center.
And though
the U.S. Jewish population is 92 percent white, with all other races combined
accounting for 8 percent, among Jews ages 18 to 29 that rises to 15 percent.
In Los
Angeles, Rachel Sumekh, 29, a first-generation Iranian-American Jew, sees
complicated layers in the story of her own Persian family. Her mother escaped
Iran on the back of a camel, traveling by night until she got to Pakistan where
she was taken in as a refugee. She then found asylum in Israel. She believes
Israel has a right to self-determination, but she also found it “horrifying” to
hear an Israeli ambassador suggest other Arab countries should take in
Palestinians.
“That is
what happened to my people and created this intergenerational trauma of losing
our homeland because of hatred,” she said.
The entire
situation feels too volatile and dangerous for many people to even want to
discuss, especially publicly.
Violence
against Jews is increasingly close to home. Last year the third-highest number
of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States were recorded since the
Anti-Defamation League began cataloging them in 1979, according to a report
released by the civil rights group last month. The A.D.L. recorded more than
1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in 2020, a 10 percent increase from
the previous year. In Los Angeles, the police are investigating a sprawling
attack on sidewalk diners at a sushi restaurant on Tuesday as an anti-Semitic
hate crime.
Outside
Cleveland, Jennifer Kaplan, 39, who grew up in a modern Orthodox family and who
considers herself a centrist Democrat and a Zionist, remembered studying abroad
at Hebrew University in 2002, and being in the cafeteria minutes before it was
bombed. Now she wondered how the Trump era had affected her inclination to see
the humanity in others, and she wished her young children were a bit older so
she could talk with them about what is happening.
“I want
them to understand that this is a really complicated situation, and they should
question things,” she said. “I want them to understand that this isn’t just a,
I don’t know, I guess, utopia of Jewish religion.”
Esther
Katz, the performing arts director at the Jewish Community Center in Omaha, has
spent significant time in Israel. She also attended Black Lives Matter protests
in Omaha last summer and has signs supporting the movement in the windows of
her home.
She has
watched with a sense of betrayal as some of her allies in that movement have
posted online about their apparently unequivocal support for the Palestinians,
and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. “I’ve had some really tough
conversations,” said Ms. Katz, a Conservative Jew. “They’re not seeing the
facts, they’re just reading the propaganda.”
Her three
children, who range in age from 7 to 13, are now wary of a country that is for
Ms. Katz one of the most important places in the world. “They’re like, ‘I don’t
understand why anyone would want to live in Israel, or even visit,’” she said.
“That breaks my heart.”
Campbell
Robertson, Liam Stack and Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting.
Elizabeth
Dias covers faith and politics from Washington. She previously covered a
similar beat for Time magazine. @elizabethjdias
Ruth Graham
is a national correspondent covering religion, faith and values. She
previously reported on religion for Slate. @publicroad
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