Now they have no choice.
Next week, Netanyahu is shoving his politics right in the face of American Jews by sending his extremist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, to Washington to speak at an Israel Bonds conference. Smotrich is the coalition partner who publicly declared that the entire West Bank Palestinian town of Huwara — where a Palestinian gunman killed two Israeli settlers and then was ransacked by settlers — “needs to be wiped out” in revenge and that “the State of Israel should do it.” (He later said it was “a slip of the tongue in a storm of emotions.”)
Israel Bonds, an organization that markets the government-backed bonds for the Ministry of Finance, had to issue a statement saying the event would go ahead as planned, explaining that its job is simply to sell the bonds for the “development of Israel’s economy without regard to politics.”
But that’s the point: There is no more “without regard to politics” when it comes to Israel’s current government. So, for the first time, you will see an Israel Bonds event attended by American Jews and picketed by Israeli Jews living in America.
Recently, three of the most important centrist voices from Israel who write for American Jewish audiences — Rabbi Daniel Gordis, Yossi Klein Halevi and Matti Friedman — published an open letter in The Times of Israel basically telling Americans that they have to stand up if they want to preserve the U.S.-Israel relationship.
“To Israel’s friends in North America, we are taking the unusual step of directly addressing you at a moment of acute crisis in Israel,” they wrote. Protecting Israel today “means defending it from a political leadership that is undermining our society’s cohesion and its democratic ethos, the foundations of the Israeli success story. … A prime minister currently on trial for corruption, and who has appointed ministers with criminal records, is claiming legitimacy to overturn the legal system.”
How to respond? I am hearing some radical new ideas. Gidi Grinstein, the founder of the Israeli think tank Reut and author of “Flexigidity: The Secret of Jewish Adaptability,” published an essay a few weeks ago in The Times of Israel calling for American Jewry to reimagine itself as “a robust, resilient and prosperous diaspora” that invests in its own vitality and institutions and contributes to American society — no longer accepting the “domineering Zionist discourse that holds American Jewry to be second-class Judaism.”
The sound you hear is the start of a huge paradigm shift.
At Sabbath services on every Saturday across America, the standard Jewish prayer book includes a prayer for the United States and another for Israel. My own middle-of-the-road Conservative synagogue in Maryland recently substituted its own “Alternative Prayer for the State of Israel,” written by a congregant, Alan Elsner. It is built around key lines from Israel’s Declaration of Independence — vowing that Israel must always be built on “freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel” — and says, “Let us pray that these words will continue to guide Israel’s leaders.”
Yes, let us pray. But prayer alone will not be enough.