Dear American Jews, do you even recognize 2025 Israel? Has Tikkun Olam — repairing the world — been confined to your immediate community and degraded to a podcast adage or a bumper sticker?
Be honest. Does Israel today resemble anything you remember from Jewish Federation brochures or your visit a few years ago? Is it the Israel your grandmother in Boca Raton thinks she knew and loved? Does she still shed tears over Leon Uris’ hero Ari Ben Canaan in “Exodus” — the character played by Paul Newman in the movie — or Moshe Dayan in the 1967 Six-Day War?
Do you care enough to apply some analysis and figure out what’s happening in Israel? Do you fully understand that “constitutional coup” isn’t the name of a new Tel Aviv restaurant but a frenetic, undemocratic assault on Israel by Benjamin Netanyahu, explicitly aimed to dismantle the Israeli democracy you were rightly proud of for so many years?
This isn’t in any way an admonition, lamentation or critique, nor is it a call for action. It’s just a bewildered question, because we don’t really know where you stand and there’s a growing sense that we’ve lost each other beyond the sugary platitudes and hollow fundraising slogans.
And while you’re here, I have a few inconvenient follow-up questions for American Jews, a vibrant, caring and politically engaged community. And yes, I personally know hundreds of you and speak regularly to dozens of you who are knowledgeable, in the loop and involved. But I address these questions in the most general way to a community of roughly 7.5 million.
Do you remember the concept of “shared values” that you expounded on so eloquently for years to describe both Israel-U.S. relations and ties between Israel and the American Jewish community? Do you think this concept is still valid?
Do you remember how you loved to repeat the moral-high-ground mantra of “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East”? Are you still comfortable with that?
Do you remember how you pointed to Israel’s judicial system as a source of democratic strength and pride? Do you still believe that?
Do you remember reciting how Israel’s army is “the most moral army in the world”? Do you still use that phrase?
Do you remember the demeaning monopoly of Israel’s government and ultra-Orthodox community over “Judaism”? Do you remember how this cartel has been treating Reform and Conservative Jews in Israel, the communities that account for around 80 percent of you? Or did this situation just grow on you?
Do you remember the slogans “We Are One” and “A Shared Destiny”? Do you still really subscribe to them other than your whining about how Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are soulmates who mimic each other?
The simple but big and very vexing question arising from all this is whether Israel makes you feel a little uncomfortable. Do some of you quietly even ascribe some blame to Israel for your queasiness, some responsibility for your predicament? I’m not saying that you should. But it would be nice to know.
In the last two years, American Jews have undergone a pendulum swing, which started with deafening silence or increasing alienation from Israel before the war. With the fighting this moved on to genuine care and engagement, and then back to inaction and paralysis. Currently, and in very broad-brush terms, American Jews are showing three types of sentiment toward Israel.
• Anxiety, fear, anger and increased involvement emanating directly from the devastation and shock of Hamas’ savagery on October 7, 2023, which was followed by a rise in antisemitism in America that U.S. Jews believe is directly linked to the war. Sometimes, anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist and pure antisemitic trends are indistinguishably entangled.
• Denialism regarding the fate of Israeli democracy, an approach of “This is just another cyclical Israeli political crisis we shouldn’t get involved in.” This evolved into alienation from Israeli politics and a natural focus on U.S. politics and its effects on the Jewish community.
• Voluntary dissociation, when a person consciously chooses to disconnect from their immediate emotional, physical or situational experience. Unlike involuntary dissociation, which occurs as an unconscious defense, voluntary dissociation is an intentional act of psychological distancing.
This is not denialism in the sense mentioned above but a convenient way to cope with very unpleasant events while being fully aware that they’re happening. This is arguably where a majority of Zionist American Jews are right now.
The October 7 catastrophe proved to be a temporary inflection point for many American Jews. In the last two decades, large groups, especially people up to age 45, have become increasingly distant and somewhat alienated from Israel. They’ve resented the ultra-Orthodox community’s religious monopoly and outsized power, and the absence of a resolution to the Palestinian issue that has subjected Israel to criticism of colonialism and even apartheid through occupation. And against the backdrop of Israel’s military and economic power, many people drifted into a gradual disconnect.
Throughout the constitutional coup that Netanyahu instigated in early 2023, American Jews, visibly unhappy with what they were seeing, cocooned into a slumber, shielding behind time-proven explanations such as “Our children don’t serve in the Israeli military”; “We don’t pay taxes in Israel”; “It’s not my place to criticize Israel’s democratically elected government”; “It’ll pass like every other crisis in Israel.”
October 7 returned the paradigm to common threats, anxiety, panic and commiserations. This was coupled with a visible rise in anti-Israel demonstrations on U.S. university campuses that featured strains of antisemitism.
So American Jews, like Israeli Jews, felt besieged. As the tide of the war turned for the better, despite frequent accusations of excessive force and war crimes, American Jews slowly reverted to their prewar positions. With the massive and crude resumption of the constitutional coup threatening the very foundations of Israeli democracy and dismantling all checks and balances, American Jews went back to a deafening silence.
I don’t fault them, but I repeat the fundamental question: Dear American Jews, do you even recognize contemporary Israel, or are you still gazing at 1990s brochures and thinking that this is reality?
First published in Haaretz, 28.03.2025
