As Israel is the Jewish state, how could Jews around the world not become targets of those who dislike the behavior of Israel?
The behavior of Jews and of the Jewish state profoundly affects how Jews are treated by non-Jews.
Actions have consequences. When Jews assert themselves in ways that harm non-Jews, non-Jews push back. This is popularly called “anti-Semitism.” How come there is no term for anti-Gentilism? Just as many non-Jews hate Jews, so too do many Jews hate non-Jews. You may argue that Jews are tiny and powerless. Well, any look at a Fortune 500 list shows you that Jews aren’t powerless (they usually comprise about a third of that list, for instance).
The real shocker of the cabinet meeting, though, was what wasn’t covered in the briefing: namely, the most explosive of the assessment report’s 12 chapters, “Relations of the Communities and Israel.” It describes dramatic changes detected in the past year, mostly for the worse, in Diaspora Jewish attitudes toward Israel, its government policies and its military actions.
In part the changes reflect shock at Israel’s behavior, both in the domestic arena and in warfare. In part they’re due to discomfort and inability to explain Israel’s actions when asked by non-Jewish friends and family. And in part they’re due, particularly among European Jews, to the increase in “frequency and severity” of anti-Jewish attacks whenever Israel takes military action against its neighbors.
…The report has a lot more to say about the other factor affecting relations with Israel: fallout from last summer’s Gaza war. This is reflected in several spheres, but most important are the strains placed on Diaspora Jews’ relationships with their “environment,” as the report puts it. These strains are serious and growing…
Far more alarming, the report says that Israel’s wars have a strong, direct impact on the relationships of Diaspora Jews to their surrounding communities and societies. Mainstream Jewish community leaders in several countries told the institute that there is an “automatic tendency” for the surrounding non-Jewish society to “view Jews as representatives of the pro-Israel position.”
This has the direct result — as the institute initially noted last year, the current report points out — of “increasing the frequency and severity of harassment/attacks on Jews in various places around the world.”
“This insight was particularly emphasized this year in light of the bloody incidents in the Jewish community of France,” the report says. It quotes a Jewish community leader from France saying: “Every time [Israel uses force] synagogues are burned.”
Curiously, the report avoids the word “anti-Semitism” when describing these attacks as consequences of Israeli actions. No less curious, there’s an earlier chapter in the report, Chapter 8, that’s devoted exclusively to the rise in European anti-Semitism, essentially referring to those same attacks. But Chapter 8 never mentions the testimony by European Jewish leaders in Chapter 9 about a link between Israeli actions and attacks on European Jews. “Anti-Semitism” and “Israeli actions” don’t appear in the same chapter.
In a way, the reticence is understandable. Drawing a causal link between European anti-Semitism and Israeli behavior — between any anti-Semitism and any Jewish behavior, for that matter — is taboo in current Jewish discourse, to the point that suggesting it is itself treated frequently as an anti-Semitic act. It must have been frightening for scholars operating in this environment to stumble across first-hand testimony that the link is real. Even more frightening when they’re preparing to face an Israeli cabinet some of whose ministers view criticism of Israeli military actions as tantamount to treason…
The Jewish People Policy Institute was founded in 2002 at the initiative of the then-chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sallai Meridor. In an interview at the time he told me that one of his major goals was to set up a channel to help the Israel government consider the needs and interests of Diaspora Jews when it makes decisions that might affect them.
Meridor said he’d been profoundly shaken up by the bombing in 1994 of the AMIA building, the headquarters of Argentina’s main Jewish organizations. Israeli intelligence believed it was carried out by Hezbollah and Iran in retaliation for Israel’s assassination in 1992 of Hezbollah’s founding leader, Sheikh Abbas Musawi. Meridor had been present as a senior aide in Israel’s Defense Ministry at the time the decision was made in 1992 to “take out” Musawi, he said, and it never occurred to anyone at the time to wonder whether the action might blow back onto Diaspora Jews.
Since then, the recommendation that Israel develop a channel to consult with Diaspora Jewry before taking actions that might affect them has appeared in nearly every one of the institute’s annual assessments. Never, though, was it driven home as powerfully as it was this year.
