La dolorosa separación entre judíos americanos e israelís, (En Inglés)

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I’m grateful to Hillel Halkin, Evelyn Gordon, and Jordan Chandler Hirsch for their enlightening responses to my essay. All four of us entertain slightly differing views on the current disconnection between American Jews and Israel, and ascribe to it somewhat disparate causes, but we’re in agreement not only that the divide is widening but (in contradistinction to many other commentators) that the principal reason for this state of affairs lies not in Israel’s policies but in what is happening in American Jewish life.

In approaching that latter phenomenon, Jordan Hirsch adopts a fascinating angle: the extent to which American Jewish sentiment about Israel can be tied to the vicissitudes of American foreign policy. As he notes, the more thoroughly foreign-policy thinking in Washington and liberal opinion more generally have been penetrated by the view of Israel as morally compromised and strategically burdensome, the more tentative has become American Jewish support for the Jewish state. But attitudes change, and Hirsch sees grounds for a certain optimism: “even as Democratic sympathy for Israel has plummeted,” he writes, “Republican sympathy has skyrocketed.” Not only that, but “the traditional and deep-seated moral and strategic alignment between America and Israel, and between the American people and Israel, still very much exists.”

Those statements are undoubtedly true. And had we been holding this discussion a year ago, I would have shared Hirsch’s hopefulness. Today, I’m not so sure. Some 150 days into the Trump administration, the president’s foreign-policy strategy is still unclear, and it seems difficult to say much about the Republican party itself with any degree of certainty.


Where Israel is concerned, the president did assert in no uncertain terms that he sees it as a strategic ally, and in various ways has acted accordingly—but also not. (Examples include the waffling on moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and the agreement to provide Saudi Arabia with $110 billion in military hardware, dwarfing the recent ten-year $38-billion deal with Israel.) Moreover, so reviled is Trump among Democrats and liberals (and some Republicans) that, should he end up pursuing a coherently activist and pro-Israel agenda in foreign policy, the effect might ironically be to exacerbate rather than retard American Jewish distancing from the Jewish state.

In brief,despite Hirsch’s edifying and provocative lessons drawn from the historical “ebbs and flows” of American foreign policy, I find myself less optimistic than he concerning the near- or medium-term prospects for a reversal among American Jews of their current disaffection with the Jewish state. And my pessimism is only reinforced when I consider the divergent cultural trends between America and Israel that fuel the disaffection—trends to which I devoted a great part of my essay.

On this point I also mark a difference between my view and that of Evelyn Gordon, who on the whole agrees with me that there is, in her words, “little prospect of a rapprochement between the two communities without a dramatic change in American Jewish attitudes toward liberalism, toward Judaism, or toward both.” Still, Gordon questions whether the divergent cultural traits pinpointed in my essay are really of the very essence, or rather, at least in the American case, of relatively recent vintage and therefore conceivably reversible.

About one of those divergent social and cultural traits—namely, American universalism versus Israeli particularism—Gordon writes:

It’s true, as Gordis notes, that unlike Israel, America was not founded to serve a particular ethnic group. Nevertheless, throughout most of its history, America has viewed itself and functioned as a nation-state. Thus, despite promoting supranational projects like the European Union, which entail forfeitures of sovereignty, America has shunned any such project for itself, preferring jealously to preserve its own sovereignty.

And on another cultural divergence, that between voluntary societies (like the U.S.) or involuntary societies (like Israel), Gordon counters my example of military conscription by pointing out that “Until 1973, when the U.S. abolished the draft, most American men did military service, just like in Israel.”

It’s true enough that America has always seen itself as a nation-state, but that has little bearing on whether it has also seen itself as committed to a particular ethnicity. We know the answer: in this respect, America has always differed from Europe, whose history is replete with examples of nation-states that also saw themselves as tied to particular ethnicities and as embodying particular ethno-national identities. Nowadays, of course, things are different: Europe consists of many nation-states that at least claim no longer to be bound to such ties or such identities. In the U.S., the transnational impulse is more muted but still very influential in the thinking and attitudes of many American elites—as Gordon’s tale of her alma mater’s evolving slogan (from “Princeton in the nation’s service,” to “. . . and in the service of all nations,” to, most recently, “. . . and the service of humanity”) vividly attests.

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