Benjamin Netanyahu just won a
record fifth term as Prime Minister of Israel. He has dominated Israeli
politics for ten years. His reelection shows the widening gap between the ideas
and politics of American and Israeli Jews.
The Israeli Attorney General
announced at the end of February that Netanyahu
will be indicted for bribery and fraud. Just days before the election,
Netanyahu said that Israel
would annex Jewish settlements on land in the West Bank taken in the
Arab-Israeli War of 1967. About 400,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements.
He said, “I will impose sovereignty, but I will not distinguish between
settlement blocs and isolated settlements. From my perspective, any point of
settlement is Israeli, and we have responsibility, as the Israeli government. I
will not uproot anyone, and I will not transfer sovereignty to the
Palestinians.”
Netanyahu’s electoral
opponents were a new coalition of centrist and conservative Israeli
politicians. Thus the choice for voters was between a continued hard line
against Palestinians and Netanyahu’s even harder line. His victory demonstrates
the preference of Israeli voters for an ethically dubious politician, who
offers no path toward peace with Palestinians, but continued seizure of
formerly Arab land.
In 2009, Netanyahu made the
following programmatic
statement about the most pressing issue in the Middle East: “I told
President Obama in Washington, if we get a guarantee of demilitarization, and
if the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, we are ready to agree
to a real peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with
the Jewish state.” Since then he has gradually been moving away from this
so-called two-state solution. In 2015, he employed harsh anti-Arab rhetoric
during the last days of the election campaign, for which he apologized after
winning. He seemed to move away from support of the two-state idea, but said
after the election that this idea was still viable.
The election of Donald Trump
pushed Israeli politics further right. Although Trump repeatedly claimed to
have a bold plan to create a peace settlement between Israelis and
Palestinians, in fact, he has openly supported Netanyahu’s movement away from
any possible settlement. A year ago, Trump announced that the US officially
recognized Jerusalem
as the capital of Israel. Trump announced last month that the US recognizes
Israeli
sovereignty over the Golan Heights, seized from Syria during the 1967 war. Netanyahu
used giant
billboards showing him shaking hands with Trump.
To support his election bid
this time, Netanyahu offered a deal to the most radical anti-Arab Israeli
parties, which had thus far failed to win enough votes to be represented in the
parliament, the Knesset. He orchestrated the merger
of three far right parties into one bloc, the “Union of Right-Wing Parties”,
and promised them two cabinet posts if he wins. One of those parties, Jewish
Power, advocates the segregation of Jews and Arabs, who make up 20% of
Israelis, and economic incentives to rid Israel of its Arab citizens. Jewish
Power holds annual
memorials for Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslims at prayer in 1994. Imagine
an American politician allying with a party which celebrates the murderous
accomplishments of Dylann Roof.
Netanyahu recently said, “Israel
is not a state of all its citizens,” but rather “the nation-state of the
Jewish people alone.” That makes a “one-state solution” impossible, because
non-Jews would automatically be second-class citizens. Netanyahu’s victory
shows that the creation of a Palestinian state is less and less likely, as the
land for such a state is increasingly seized by Israel.
While most Israelis also say
they support a two-state solution, their real politics makes this support
meaningless. A poll
of Israelis in 2017 showed Jews leaning heavily to the right and extreme
right. A more
recent poll showed greatly increasing support for annexation: 16% support
full annexation of the West Bank with no rights for Palestinians; 11% support
annexation with rights for Palestinians; 15% support annexation of only the
part of the West Bank that Israel currently fully controls, about 60% of it.
About 30% don’t know and 28% oppose annexation.
Meanwhile, the uprooting
of Arabs and confiscation of their land continue as Jewish settlements
expand. While the West Bank is highlighted in the news, the Israeli policy of
expelling native Arabs from their homes has also been taking place for decades
in the Negev desert in southern Israel. Bedouin communities, many of which
predate the founding of the Israeli state, have been systematically uprooted as
part of an Israeli
plan of concentrating all Bedouins into a few towns, in order to use their
land for Jewish settlements and planned forests. The Bedouin communities are “unrecognized”,
meaning that the Israeli government considers them illegal. Illegal Jewish
settlements in that region have been recognized and supported, while much older
Bedouin communities have been labeled illegal and demolished or slated for
demolition. Essential services, like water and electricity, have been denied to
the agricultural Bedouin villages in order to
force their citizens to move to the new urban townships.
American Jews are
overwhelmingly liberal. Polls since 2010 show over two-thirds supporting
Democrats for Congress, rising to 76% in 2018. This long-standing liberalism
meant broad support among American Jews for the civil rights struggle during
the 20th century. Now the open discrimination against Arabs by the
Israeli state, which in some ways resembles the former South African apartheid
system, reduces sympathy for Israel.
Surveys of American Jews have
demonstrated a consistent
support for a two-state solution. Since 2008, about 80% of American Jews
support the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. 80% also
agree that a “two-state solution is an important national security interest for
the United States.” Many factors have been moving American Jews away from
support of Israel. The close family connections between Jews in America and
Israel after World War II have diminished over the past half-century. The
continued dominance of Israeli politics by ultra-Orthodox religious policies
has worn out the patience of more secular American Jews in Conservative and
Reform congregations.
In fact, the greatest support
for hard-line Israeli policies has not been from American Jews, as Ilhan Omar
recently implied, but from evangelical Christians who support Trump. After
Netanyahu talked about annexing West Bank land, nine
major mainstream American Jewish groups wrote to Trump asking him to
restrain the Israeli government from annexation, saying that “it will lead to
greater conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.”
The drifting apart of
American Jews and Israelis is a tragic development, but perhaps an inevitable
one. As Jews gradually assimilated into American democracy, they congregated at
the liberal end of the political spectrum, feeling kinship with other minorities
which experienced discrimination. American Jewish religious politics affirmed
the traditional
Jewish ethical ideas of justice, truth, peace, and compassion. Israeli Jews
have faced a radically different environment. Although many of the early
Israeli settlers and leaders came from the leftist European labor tradition,
decades of conflict with Arab neighbors, in which both sides perpetrated
countless atrocities, have led to hardening attitudes of self-defense and
hatred for the other.
Jews in Israel support
politicians and policies that I reject as abhorrent. That is a personal tragedy
for me. The larger tragedy is that there appears to be no solution at all to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
April 16, 2019
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