Israel’s Message to U.S. Jews: If You’re Against the Occupation, You’re Not Welcome
My Saba, Yoseph Amit, made aliyah as a young man
from Poland in the late 1930s. He was escaping the rise of fascism and
anti-Semitism in Europe, and aspiring toward what he called then, in the
Hashomer Hatzair Youth youth movement, Hagshama Atzmit, self-realization, in Zion.
Would
my Saba, a devoted Socialist Zionist pioneer who left everything he
knew to build kibbutzim and create a new life, be accepted by today’s
institutions in Israel? Or would he be targeted by this Israeli
government as an undesirable for his left-wing opinions?
This week the Jewish Agency for Israel withdrew its funding for Achvat Amim, a Masa-funded program overseen by Hashomer Hatzair based on spurious allegations by a shadowy group called Ad Kan.
Ad
Kan is an arm of the most extreme elements of Israel’s settler
movement. It has been called "Israel’s volunteer thought police," a
group that recruits Israelis to become citizen-spies, reporting on their
fellow Israelis in a two-bit McCarthyist attempt to weed out anyone who doesn’t fit their vision of an Israel for Jews only.
Armed
with hidden cameras and microphones, Ad Kan members lie about their
identities, join left-wing organizations and try to capture "gotcha"
moments with members. Other times they scrutinize and “investigate”
individual activists and then offer their deceptive material to Israel’s
mainstream news.
In
this case, Ad Kan was incensed that Jews would participate in
nonviolent activism alongside Palestinians in the West Bank. So they got
to work identifying individual activists to name, shame and blame.
This
is the settler right’s tried and true tactic: guilt by association. Ad
Kan and other extreme right-wing organizations like it understand that
when the public conversation focuses on how policies like the occupation
affect people’s lives, they lose. So instead, they create bogeymen and
come up with convoluted chains of association among them to imply some
nefarious cabal.
Sound
familiar? These are the same types of fantasies about power and treason
that anti-Semites used for generations to target Jews. It’s eerily
similar to the implication of the cartoon posted by Yair Netanyahu to Facebook – for which he has been embraced by neo-Nazis in America.
Ad Kan and its settler right allies, like Im Tirtzu
and the Samaria Settlers' Committee, have been reading from the same
anti-Semitic playbook for some time. In 2009, Im Tirtzu created a
campaign designed to topple the New Israel Fund using imagery of NIF’s
then-president, Naomi Chazan, with a horn on her head.
The
attacks on NIF by Im Tirtzu and others did nothing to hamper our
activities to promote democracy and equality for all Israelis. But this
time, guilt-by-association tactics led the Jewish Agency to withdraw
funding from a Hashomer Hatzair-affiliated volunteer program.
This
is a disappointing surrender to the settler right, and not just because
of its underhanded and dishonest tactics. These decisions determine
what kind of Zionism is acceptable in today’s Israel, and the answer is
far narrower than ever before in Israel’s history. The incremental
witch-hunting that attempts to mark and silence undesirable elements
often starts in organizations like Ad Kan. But dropping the Hashomer
Hatzair program is just the latest example of how these actions
influence policy.
There
can be no mistake: the Jewish Agency canceled its support of Achvat
Amim because of the leaders’ progressive political perspective – though
plenty of right-wing programs receive Jewish Agency support.
If
these institutions insist on one narrow and far-right political
perspective, they shouldn’t be surprised when their participant pool
dries up. Young American Jews are overwhelmingly progressive. They are
committed to an Israel in which Jews’ right to self-realization must not
come at the expense of others’ same rights; they believe that we can
and must always dream of a better future and work to create it.
And
rather than embrace them, Israeli institutions are closing their doors.
Daniel Roth and Karen Isaacs, who founded Achvat Amim, are two
aspirational Zionists who defy the trend of turning away from Israel.
They made aliya directly out of their commitment to a better future in
Israel and their contemporary Hagshama Atzmit. They should be seen as
among the great examples of the success of the Zionist project.
In
fact, before cowing to Ad Kan’s smear campaign, Daniel and Karen’s
now-defunded program was held up as an example by the Jewish Agency,
which surely must know that American Jews will stop participating in its
programs if it does not provide a place for progressives too. Now,
they are told to shut up and sit down – and, underneath it, to get out.
You
can’t curate away the truth. American Jews are not blind, though these
government-sponsored programs may try to keep the blinders on. American
Jews can see the occupation; half of young American Jews believe
settlements are hurting prospects for peace. No amount of censorship
will stop this. Instead, these institutions are closing the doors to
every authentic access point that young (and older) American Jews have
to engage with Israel.
I
want to ask my Saba Yoseph what he dreamed of when he left his home to
go to Palestine as a pioneer in the 1930s. We have never had this
conversation, and my mother, also a Shomeret, never had it either. Saba
Yoseph died in 1948 defending Israel in the War of Independence. My
mother was born in the kibbutz that he helped found just a few months
later. But knowing that he was raised in Hashomer Hatzair, I know that
included in his ideology, as is included in mine, is the core concept of
Achvat Amim: Solidarity Among Nations. I know it meant
something different to him – given the changes in the world and in
Israel – but Israel was built by Zionists with a variety of ideologies
and his was a left-wing one.
We
cannot allow a small group of radical extremists to define what it
means to be Zionist, or to be an acceptable part of Israeli society. If
Israel’s institutions now turn their backs on Daniel and Karen, on their
program and all their participants – past, present, and future – whose
aspirational Zionism is based upon solidarity among nations, not racist
and exclusionary ideologies, would those institutions also turn their
backs on Saba Yoseph? And more importantly, will there be anything left
of the Zionist dream that my children and grandchildren will be able to
connect to?
Libby
Lenkinski is the Vice President for Public Engagement at New Israel
Fund and the Board Chair for Hashomer Hatzair North America.
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