Precarity, the state of persistent uncertainty or insecurity, would seem to be the true state of the Jews. We are threatened because of our religion, our beliefs, and our ethics. We are threatened because of our customs and culture. We are threatened by our successes. We are denounced collectively for any perceived failings of any single individual Jew.
Our state of precarity can be real or imagined, physical or psychological. We can be assaulted for a death that happened 2,000 years ago in which neither we, our parents, nor our grandparents took part. We can be mobbed and blocked from attending classes, concerts, and conferences because of what is happening thousands of miles away. We can be ostracized in our state of exile or subjected to BDS campaigns when we are gathered in our state.
What is at stake is the existential discontinuity of the Jews, either physically, spiritually, or culturally. To make matters more complex and convoluted and thereby more difficult to deal with, we Jews know that we are threatened not only from the outside but from within as well.
Threatened from all directions
From the outside, there’s Karen Attiah, a Washington Post columnist who defended the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack as a justified attempt to seek the result of a “decolonization.” The academic discourse that has fed the minds of students these past decades – who have gone on to become diplomats and political and community leaders – that Zionism is “settler-colonialism” has assisted the pro-Palestinianism cause to gain adherents across the global South and especially amongst Black Americans.
As for within, some of the latest threats to Jewish existence on multi-levels include the Jews who promote a nasty version of traditional anti-Zionism. Susie Linfield has reviewed Peter Beinart’s new volume, terming it a “deeply duplicitous book.” There is, too, Daniel Levy, who followed former hostage Noa Argamani at the UN Security Council session last week.
Levy is currently president of the US/Middle East Project (USMEP) and was a founder of J Street.
He engaged in a false equivalency charge of death between the murder of the Bibas children – murdered in captivity – and Arab Gazan children who died. He claimed Israel “turned off incubators.”
He spoke of the Israeli ambassador’s shredding of the UN Charter at the General Assembly as “a challenge that cannot be allowed to pass.” Did he mean that Hamas had free license? Is Hamas a “partisan resistance group” as he implied? Has Hamas ever been “heavily sanctioned” by the UN, as he stated?
Does Levy truly believe, as he declared, that “Hamas non-governance in Gaza is achievable; the movement itself has said so?” He justified continued terror by first terming it “resistance’ and by next defining Israel as engaged in “the structural violence of occupation and apartheid.” He also cautioned against zero-sum thinking yet ignored the emptiness of his own preening thinking.
When I note “from within,” that includes Israeli agents for Iran, like Daniel Kitov, arrested this week, a dozen other incarcerated spies, and Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who is attempting to prevent the appointment of Governor Mike Huckabee as America’s next Ambassador to Israel.
In his letter to senators, Pesner highlighted several of Huckabee’s problems, which he defined as a lack of commitment “to advancing US interests and values abroad.” For Pesner, Huckabee should be rejected because he declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” Huckabee “denied the reality of Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the ‘West Bank.’” He “welcomed the possibility of broader Israeli ‘annexation’ of the ‘West Bank.’” All these claims are mainstream political conversations here in Israel.
Pesner then added something I found astounding. Here he is, exploiting his position as a religious, faith-based leader, guided by his own theology, suggesting that “Huckabee’s views may be shaped in significant part by his deeply held evangelical faith,” including what is known as “Christian Zionism.” Pesner sees this ideology as promoting “the belief that Jewish sovereignty over the biblical Land of Israel” is connected to Jesus’s return.
I cannot ignore the lure of noting to Pesner that most assuredly, Jesus, a Jew, would not in any way oppose that sovereignty. After all, he was born in Judea (Luke 2:4). His parents brought him back from Egypt to Eretz Yisrael (Matthew 2:20-21). In his life, as John 4 records, Jesus went through Samaria, came to the “land Jacob had given to his son Joseph,” and was told “your people say that it is necessary to worship in Jerusalem.”
I will not press Pesner on whether he would consider himself praying on the Temple Mount, as a Jew, of course, or travel through Judea and Samaria and visit the Jews residing there. His views on the right of Jews to return to the heartland of their national home should not become the benchmark to guide those who also employ political, military, topographical, and strategic components in addition to their faith. Indeed, he should leave the theological matter of Jesus’s return to Christians and concentrate on his own failure to return to Zion.
Yet Pesner’s message is more inimical. Not only is he implying, subtly, that only his form of a universalist liberal Judaism is best, or is he casting doubt on employing any “personal faith” to be “transformed into government policies” if they do not possess “strategic well-being and moral values” that serve US interests, but he strikes at the heart of American heritage.
Would he wish “In God we trust” to be struck from US currency? Would he seek to recast the Liberty Bell to replace the verse taken from Leviticus 25? How much “faith” and religious heritage is good? How much is bad? Who picks and chooses what is good and inclusive, and who decides what is not?
Those combating Zionism, maligning it as “Israelism,” interfering with Israel’s support amongst its friends and allies, resurrecting a non-national Judaism or sanctifying a Diasporic existence, are simply contributing to a new round of Jewish precariousness.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.