I'm Michael, I'm a Millennial Jew, and I haven't been in a synagogue since I got married in one. There are a lot of reasons for that. Little me had real issues with the old theological problem of evil. There's a pandemic which makes gathering in large crowds a reckless idea. Synagogue membership is kinda pricy, and I'm already in the red due to my avocado toast habit. But one reason is that the last temple I was in was weirdly focused on Israel, and not very concerned with the actual Jews in the actual city it was in. And this bothered me, because I take universal human rights seriously, Trump's America is a worrying place to be Jewish, the Israeli human rights record is not great, and don't we all have bigger problems closer to home?
Eric Alterman is a journalist and historian who's studied the American-Israeli relationship for decades, and We Are Not One is his opus, a revelatory book that is required reading for anyone who shares my doubts and disenchantments. The thing about the Israel-Palestine debate in contemporary American Judaism is that there is no such thing. The matter is settled. American Jews are supposed to shut up, get in line, and support Israel no matter what. And despite large divergences in culture and politics, aside from some quiet grumbling, that's how it's worked. And if anything, American Jews are actually less supportive of Israel than the average American, and certainly less supportive than the average politician or media figure, who'd rather slit their own throat than cross the Israel lobby.
The book opens with a 2019 quote from then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, "If the capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that'll remain is our commitment to Israel", a statement less metaphorical after Trump's January 6th coup attempt. Republicans are even more ardently pro-Israel than Democrats in a rare bipartisan consensus.
At Israel's founding, American support for the new state was far from given. While FDR was cosmopolitan and had many Jewish friends and staffers, Harry Truman had the typical provincial antisemitism of the time, yet came around as a strong supporter of the new state. The Jewish community was internally divided on the Zionist question, with the leading American Jewish Committee unable to reach a position and various rabbis dueling for priority. The romance of the Israeli War of Independence, and a cannily organized PR campaign around the novel and movie Exodus by Leon Uris helped link American sentiments to Israel.
While the sentimental attachment to Israel was amplified by victories in the Six Day War, and disaster into victory of the Yom Kippur War, American Jewish support for Israel was financial and political, but rarely personal. The number of American Jews who made aliyah was always vanishingly small. Israel was an idea, a Zionist imaginary of "next year in Jerusalem", rather than an actual move to Tel Aviv.
But the action practice of Zionism, an ethnic colonial movement which requires perforce the salami-slicing occupation of land inhabited by Palestinians, was anathema to mainstream American Jewish liberal sensibilities. For much of the 20th century, this cognitive dissonance was carefully managed. Jewish liberalism ended at Israeli borders. Three interlocking political factors ensured this cognitive dissonance didn't boil over.
The first was the neoconservative movement, a hard anti-communist rejection of both traditional American conservative isolationism and Nixon's détente. In this new political movement, with many ideological Jewish Americans, Israel was a bastion of American values against the Soviet-backed Arab states, against the conventional wisdom that oil and population meant the United States should buddy up to Arabs who could support American economic interests. The second was the rise of political Evangelical Christianity. The return of Jews to the Holy Land is a key part of Evangelical eschatology, a necessary prelude before Revelations. And third was the capture of American institutional Judaism by billionaire donors with hard Zionist views, primarily the late Sheldon Adelson (and may his memory be a bight). AIPAC became not a Jewish or even pro-Israel lobbying group, but specifically a pro-Likud organization with the barest pretense of larger Jewish values, much more comfortable with billionaires and evangelicals than actual American Jews.
This state of affairs has had several effects, both in America and Israel. The first is the enervated state of contemporary Reform Judaism. Judaism has often been defined by deliberate difference from surrounding gentiles, while Reform Judaism domesticates and smooths a lot of rough edges in the name of integration, winding up with something that feels a lot like mainstream Protestantism with services Friday night. But without theological or cultural distinction from general American culture, Reform Judaism has centered Holocaust remembrance and Zionism as its major causes. There's not much there there in Reform Judaism, and in response to younger Jews drifting out of the faith, institutional leaders have tripled down on the Zionism card, showing both cowardice and a fatal lack of creativity.
The second is the Zionist noise machine, which is centered on AIPAC but supported by a wide range of longstanding Jewish organizations and hastily spun-off PR fronts. Jews certainly don't control the media, or the banks, or government, but crossing AIPAC is a bad idea. If you're a politician, you'll be primaried with your opponent raking in hefty support. If you're a professor, a journalist, or other public intellectual, even the mildest criticism of Israeli policies, such as referring to the state of affairs as an occupation, apartheid, saying "Palestinian homeland", or remarking that maybe Israel should consider American wishes given the hundreds of billions of dollars of aid they have received, will invite a swarm of criticism from ardent Zionist culture warriors. And third, while at the same time arguing that accusations of "dual-loyalty" are an anti-Semitic attack, AIPAC will label any Jew who speaks against them as self-hating, and demand an unflinching primary loyalty to Israel.
The last consequence is an active disdain for American Jews on the part of the Israelis, and for American political priorities. Israelis don't much like American Jews. They don't regard Reform Judaism as a valid religion. And while they'll reluctantly agree to anything at various American sponsored peace conferences, not a single Israeli prime minister has ever done more than briefly halted settlements in the occupied territories or given the most perfunctory rebuke to extrajudicial Israeli security service assassinations and torture. The Israeli future has no peace plan, simply a large question mark and then "and no more Arabs", and as Americans we should be honest about that.
Something has to give. I'm not sure what it will be, but I'm willing to do the work to ensure it's the idea that American Jews are mandatory Zionists. Israel has made its bed, and good luck with the Third Temple. We've been a diasporan people for a long time, and I think we'll be okay in another diaspora.
And if you've read this far, you deserve some salacious family gossip. My great grandmother Grace was a pillar of the Jewish community, and specifically the American Jewish Committee, in the 1940s and active in a lot of causes, including refugee resettlement after World War 2. When my grandmother graduated college in 1949, she and Grace did a European grand tour. At the time Grace was mixed on Zionism, which was the official non-position of the AJC. Her refugee work had brought her into contact with an Israeli named Shiloah (you want to click that link), and he told the Los Angeles Israeli consul, who was a friend of Grace, that Grace and my grandmother had to include Israel on this grand tour, or he'd be an ex-consul. Not wanting to blow up a friend's career, Grace extended the trip.
So the two of them had a grand time in the new country of Israel, spending two weeks in the country seeing the sites, visiting kubutzes and battlefields and ancient holy sites and meeting various important political figures and heroes of the war. Grace nearly caused an international incident by sticking her tongue out at Jordanian guards at the border of Old Jerusalem. And a glamorous and shirtless Mossad agent attempted and failed to seduce my then 21-year old grandmother (she was quite a babe, and also quite innocent), either as a classic honeypot, or just normal human hormones. His name is not mentioned in her memoirs, but he was a British Spitfire pilot who was undercover as an advisor to the Egyptian Air Force, and defected with his plane after passing along all the intelligence he could gather. Sometimes the charm offensive lands close to home.