The tragic Israel wedge

Israel has not just become a pathologically unhinged obsession in the Western world. It’s also turning into a wedge issue that’s splitting Diaspora Jews from each other.

Last week, New York City’s Islamist mayor Zohran Mamdani broadcast a video packed with eye-watering lies painting Israelis as cruel and bloodthirsty genocidal monsters determined to kill and starve innocents in Gaza.

The purpose of this two-minute hate was to signal that it was now open season against Zionism and the Jews of the city, for whom the price of acceptance is to be the institutionalized demonization of Israel to further Mamdani’s driving aim of the destruction of the Jewish state.

The full implications of this strategy were well understood by Angela Buchdahl, the Reform rabbi of Manhattan’s Central synagogue. In a strong open letter to the mayor, she wrote that he had used “rhetoric that demonizes Jews and the Jewish state” and had therefore put “a bullseye on our backs.”

But Mamdani is also taking more direct aim at his city’s Jewish community.

Earlier this week, he appointed an 18-member advisory committee on the judiciary without a single Jewish attorney, former judge, or legal professional—this in a city where Jews make up approximately half of all its lawyers.

The message was unmistakable. The mayor is simply trying to erase civic involvement by the city’s Jews.

Mamdani’s broader aim is to transform America’s most important city into an Islam-compliant welfare dependency with no potential challenge to his power base.

Islamists believe that Jewish power is their principal obstacle to conquering the West. With New York containing the largest Jewish population in the world outside Israel, Mamdani is setting out to neutralize the Jews through discrimination and an atmosphere that incites harassment, intimidation and violence against them.

Appallingly, more than 30% of the city’s Jews voted Mamdani into office. Other Jewish New Yorkers understood from the get-go that he was hostile to Israel, although even then many of them didn’t fully appreciate just how monomaniacal he is in his hatred of Israel and the Jewish people.

Some liberal Jews still refuse to acknowledge this. The rise in Jew-hatred, they say, has been caused by the policies of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the extremist members of his coalition.

Many British Jews, under siege from the largest rise in Jew-hatred in the world last year, similarly blame Israel for their plight.

Seeking scapegoats to avoid the reality that’s staring them in the face, such myopic Jews ignore the steady rise in Jew-hatred that’s occurred over the past several decades in lockstep with the radicalization of the left and the increasing dominance of “Palestinian” propaganda.

The most agonized Jews, however, are those liberal progressives who had the ground on which they stand knocked away from underneath them by the atrocities of the Hamas-led onslaught against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Unable to deny that their own side had sanitized and supported the Palestinian Arabs, who revealed themselves on that terrible day to be depraved and psychopathic savages, they still cling to many of the delusional lies and distortions of the progressive mindset that cast Israel as the villain of the region.

Now, however, they are being presented with a choice they can’t ignore. To be accepted as New Yorkers, Jews are being expected to denounce Israel and renounce Zionism.

Buchdahl got the point. She told Mamdani: “You continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”

America is now following down a very hard road trodden by British Jews for more than two decades.

Even while Israelis were being blown to kingdom come in the Second Intifada, the Israel Defense Forces were being called “Nazis” in Britain for trying to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in the “West Bank.” And British Jews were accordingly presented with an ultimatum: If you don’t denounce Israel, then you aren’t to be considered fully British.

Today, the Israel wedge is also being used to marginalize Jews in New York by splitting them off from mainstream society. But it’s also splitting progressive Jews down the middle. An anguished debate is now taking place among them about the relationship between Zionism and Judaism.

Tragically, many of them see no innate connection between the two. Jonathan Jacoby, the national director of the Nexus Project, a left-wing antisemitism watchdog, said the conflation of Jews and Israel was “one of the most serious challenges that we face.”

The ignorance makes one want to weep. Judaism holds that the Jewish people were given a Divine command to establish a righteous society in the land of Israel. Jewish religious laws are rooted in the land. Jewish liturgy is studded with references to Zion.

While, of course, Jews remain Jews even if they are neither observant nor Zionists, anti-Zionism, which would destroy the religion by detaching it from the land, is therefore inescapably anti-Judaism.

Progressives don’t get this because they’ve bought into the worldview that liberal universalist or Marxist ideologies, along with the “intersectionality” they have spawned, are authentic Jewish values. They think that anyone telling them that these are all, in fact, anti-Jewish ideologies is a bad person and therefore “right-wing”—for them, the ultimate evil.

As a result, they believe many of the lies about Israel. They can’t grasp that the demonization of the Jewish state is precisely what’s been done to destroy Jews down through the centuries.

So they end up in the same place as the Jew-haters, claiming that the Jews are using the charge of antisemitism to cover up the crimes of Israel. Believing that “the right” is monstrous, they have ended up supporting monsters themselves.

This is hardly being helped by the behavior of certain Israelis. A public letter was sent this week to U.S. President Donald Trump by Matan Vilnai, an Israeli politician and a former deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, on behalf of Commanders for Israel’s Security, an organization representing hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers.

The letter claimed that “escalating violence in the West Bank” by “Jewish terrorists” was poised to “ignite the region” and that much of it was being orchestrated by members of the Israeli government.

This deeply impressed New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who laid into “anti-Palestinian settler terrorism” and dismissed Netanyahu’s claim that only about 150 youths were involved.

Even if 1,000 individuals were involved, that would still only represent 0.2% of the total Jewish population of around 500,000 in Judea and Samaria.

And these unprovoked attacks, while undeniably a problem that needs to be far better dealt with, are vastly exceeded by the many thousands of murderous Arab attacks against Jews living in these areas.

These have hugely increased since Oct. 7 and now threaten a third intifada. To which neither the Israelis nor Stephens made any reference at all.

“Settler violence” has been grossly exaggerated and decontextualized as another libel with which to demonize Israel. Vilnai and his colleagues belong to a cadre of Oslo “two-state solution” diehards for whom, along with most of the Israeli media and a large section of the intelligentsia, Netanyahu and the “settlers” are the enemy who are always guilty as charged.

Israelis like Vilnai and his ilk have disproportionate influence in the West. They not only provide priceless ammunition for the enemies of the Jewish people, but also play into the ignorance and prejudice of many diaspora Jews—a rising number of whom are turning against Israel.

The increasing gap between Judaism and Israel needs to be closed very fast. That means teaching the Jewish community, particularly the young, essential truths about Judaism and Jewish history in the land of Israel. It means teaching them how Israel always upholds international laws. It means teaching them that real Jewish values are, in fact, the things they most deeply believe in and in which they can take pride.

Jews of all denominations need to raise their game to do this. But progressive rabbis, who will need all their courage to confront deeply rooted, damaging assumptions, have the most crucial and challenging role of all.