British Jewish deference to Israel is dead

Demonstrators protest against Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit, Whitehall in London, March 2023

Joel Rosen writes in Haaretz on 7 June 2023:

After Israel’s November election, a few months into my term as president of the U.K. and Ireland’s Union of Jewish Students, we released a particularly strong condemnation of the nascent government, and I braced for a significant public backlash from major communal organizations.

But it never came.

Many urged caution in private, and some students from both the left and right took issue with the content of the statement, but the vast majority understood and supported our message: This Israeli government’s values are not our values. In the months that followed, as the far-right began its assault on the judiciary, major communal organizations followed, issuing public condemnations of their own.

The British Jewish community has a longstanding connection to and affinity with Israel. We are geographically closer than the other English-speaking diaspora communities and visit often. Tens of thousands of Israelis have made the United Kingdom their home. There are numerous active Zionist youth movements across the country.

It is because, not in spite of, this affinity that recent trends might surprise many in our community. In February, 77 percent of British Jews said it was acceptable for those who live in the Diaspora to publicly express concern about Israel’s government, according to the leading pollster Survation.

Unsurprisingly, given the more liberal bent of younger people in Britain, this number rose to 85 percent among Jews aged between 18 and 24. Crucially, only 10 percent thought it unacceptable.

The numbers are clear: The sense of deference that once characterized the British Jewish Diaspora is dead. It is a shift I’ve encountered in countless conversations with students in dozens of universities across the United Kingdom and Ireland who are unencumbered by the inhibitions of previous generations.

I’ve spoken to students from progressive denominations fearful of proposed changes to the law of return; to LGBTQ students frightened by the normalization of queerphobia and to Israelis studying abroad anxious about what awaits them upon their return. Some of the students I speak to are unwilling to voice their concerns to their parents. A large number are cautious and feel torn between a difficult and sometimes hostile backdrop on campus and their desire to speak out.

Few would see British Jewry as a radical community. Our rate of synagogue membership is far higher than that of American Jewry. Polls indicate, most British Jews vote Conservative, and every Shabbat, Jews of all denominations pray for the welfare of the king. Conventions and taboos endure. In our community, change happens quietly.

Nevertheless, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, things have changed. The change is unmistakable, irrevocable and all too often overlooked.

The change is vital. We cannot countenance staying silent as fanatics speak in the name of world Jewry. If we oppose the far-right in the United Kingdom and the United States we are duty-bound to also do so in Israel.

To borrow from Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” For decades the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have espoused fundamentalist politics and incited violence against Palestinians. In the November statement endorsed by our elected student representatives, inspired by previous generations of Jewish students who stood against racism and fascism, we “unequivocally condemned their anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism and their homophobia” and expressed our alarm at “the rise of extremism and violence that preceded this result.”

A few weeks ago, I was asked by Israeli expats in London to address their pro-democracy rally. I tried to make the moral case for standing up and speaking out. Many Diaspora critics of the government have focused on who they are and what they’re doing. But we must also ask another, deeply troubling question, why are they doing it? When governments amass power they do not readily relinquish that power. When extreme governments amass power they do not do so without intent to use that power.

To truly understand these fundamentalists, we need to dig deep and look beyond the ebb and flow of electoral politics. We should rescue from obscurity an underrated Zionist thinker – Yitzchak Epstein, who made aliyah from Russia in 1886. Before the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, he posed, in his words, “a question that outweighs all the others, namely the question of our attitude toward the Arabs.”

In the speech that was later published by Ahad Ha’am’s Shiloah in 1907, he prophetically warned: “We pay close attention to all the affairs of our land, we discuss and debate everything, we praise and curse everything, but we forget one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving.”

The fundamentalists in Israel’s government have their own answer to Epstein’s question. It can be found on placards and graffiti, in incendiary speeches and court indictments.

In 2017, Smotrich outlined what he termed his “decisiveness plan,” offering Palestinians on either side of the Green Line three options: emigrate, resist or surrender with second-class status and limited voting rights. His supremacism lives on; as recently as 2021, Smotrich turned to Arab members of the Knesset and said, “You’re only here by mistake, because Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948.” He is now a member of Israel’s cabinet, with the finance portfolio and a position in the Defense Ministry.

This incitement is not confined to parties on the far-right. A year ago, Likud’s Israel Katz, a former foreign minister and now energy minister, stood at the Knesset podium and issued a chilling threat to students at Israeli universities flying the Palestinian flag: “Remember 1948. Remember our War of Independence and your Nakba, Ask your elders, your grandfathers and grandmothers, and they will explain to you that in the end, the Jews awaken, they know to defend themselves and the idea of the Jewish state.”

In addition to the repugnant racism, some have selfishly sought to undermine the fight against antisemitism. In response to Elon Musk’s recent tweet that Hungarian billionaire and bogeyman of the far right George Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization,” Amichai Chikli, the minister charged with Israel’s diaspora relations, lauded Musk as a “role model.” He declared that “criticism of Soros – who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel – is anything but antisemitism, quite the opposite!” To Chikli, an antisemitic dog whistles directed against his political opponents is praiseworthy. Never mind that in 2018, Cesar Sayoc, a fanatical Trump supporter, mailed a pipe bomb to Soros’s home.

Ultra-nationalist politicians have for some time claimed to speak in the interests of world Jewry and appropriated the Diaspora to legitimate their extremism. Indeed, it was in Paris that Smotrich stood before a map of “Greater Israel” – one that included the entirety of Jordan and denied the existence of the Palestinian people.

Jewish communities around the world are finally confronting these pyromaniacs, who, in addition to their racism and homophobia, seem intent on enraging and endangering the Diaspora.

While we have a long way to go, I am proud of the role played by Jewish students in changing the discourse within our community. Jews across the Diaspora possess in the rich inheritance of our tradition, the tools with which we can conceive of another reality based on equality and justice for all Israelis and Palestinians. “Seek peace and pursue it,” instructs the Psalmist. “Love the stranger, for you were once strangers in a strange land” in the words Exodus. “Do not do unto others that which is hateful to yourself,” says the sage Hillel. We have to reclaim our traditions and ideals from those who betray and usurp them.

Over a century ago, Yitzchak Epstein sat in Palestine at the turn of the 20th century, saw the humanity of the other and confronted the difficult questions most evaded. In Israel and diaspora, it is time we did the same.

Joel Rosen is the president of the Union of Jewish Students, which represents thousands of students and over 75 university Jewish societies across the U.K. and Ireland. Joel sits on the Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies. He is also a Rabbi Sacks Learning Fellow at the London School of Jewish Studies.

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