3 Weeks in Israel, 3 Crucial Lessons for U.S. Jewry

July 27, 2023 Guest Contributor

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (center) is shown surrounded by Aryeh Deri (right) and other lawmakers in the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem last December. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90 via JTA)

By Matthew Weinstein

This summer, my three weeks visiting Israel yielded three crucial lessons about how we should relate to Israel’s current extraordinary circumstances.

This was my 11th visit to Israel, now amounting to nearly four years there in total, beginning with my Baltimore Hebrew High School summer tour in 1979 led by the legendary Shmuel Litov.

In all that time, one constant has always been a permanent state of tension in the air. The source of the tension has varied — sometimes conflict with neighbors, sometimes the internal conflicts that have riven Israel from the start.

But the situation today is different, and that bring us to lesson #1:

Israel is always in crisis. This time, the difference is that Israelis think so, too.

It’s understandable that Israelis have always been more casual than we American Jewish visitors about the tensions that are a constant hum in their lives. Life goes on and they adjust to whatever comes.

The threat of rockets from Gaza and Lebanon? Israel now has Iron Dome to shoot them down and, for those rockets that slip through, construction laws require a reinforced room in every home, making the dash to the bomb shelter that I experienced during the 1991 Gulf War a thing of the past for most Israelis.

Even Israel’s internal rifts — between religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Mizrachi, Arab and Jew, etc. — have always been less powerful than a basic sense of national unity exemplified by the enormous popularity of songs like 1991’s Eurovision entry “Kan” and 2019’s “A Tribe of Brothers and Sisters.”

But there is no precedent for the current crisis set off last December when the new Netanyahu government announced its intention to enact fundamental changes to the Israeli system of government, primarily to end the independence of the judiciary, taking Israel down the same authoritarian path as Poland, Hungary and others.

Israel has never seen a protest movement like the one that has mobilized literally millions to participate in weekly demonstrations all over the country every Saturday night for well over half a year. The apocalyptic tone of the speakers at these rallies, who are mostly senior military and civil society leaders, is stunning, as are the declarations by thousands of Israeli reservists that they will no longer serve in the military now that the judicial changes are being enacted.

The IDF has always been Israel’s top source of unity. Are those days now behind us? The head of the IDF warned ominously that Israel “won’t exist as a nation in the region” without a strong military. The hundreds of generals at Commanders for Israel’s Security further warn that the ongoing de facto annexation of the West Bank threatens, rather than enhances, Israeli security.

What happens next depends to a considerable degree on the American Jewish community, which brings me to lesson #2:

The pro-democracy majority of Israelis are counting on us – and the American government — to help save Israeli democracy.

At the Saturday night protest rallies, it is clear that the democracy movement‘s scenario for success includes a central role for America. That’s because of the role played by the United States in the internal Israeli political dynamic: enabler or brakesman.

President Trump was the worst enabler we’ve ever seen of the most dangerous players in Israeli politics — the messianic extremists whose dream is to annex the West Bank and drive out the Palestinian population there so Israel can hold on to the West Bank/Judea and Samaria forever without having to choose between being Jewish and democratic. (Israel’s finance minister and minister in charge of settlement expansion, Bezalel Smotrich, made his attitude about this clear in 2021.)

But President Biden can play the role of brakesman, setting limits so even a prime minister like Netanyahu will have no choice but say to his extremist partners, “I’m sorry, I can’t let you carry out pogroms in the West Bank, expand settlements, and undermine the two-state solution because the U.S. is finally setting real limits and threatening actual consequences if we don’t put on the brakes.”

Here’s some of what the Biden administration can do:

* Reverse the Pompeo Doctrine declaring that the U.S. no longer views Israel’s West Bank settlements as illegal under international law and products like wines from the radical settlement of Psagot could be labeled for U.S. sale as “Made in Israel.”

* Support the Menendez/Meeks SAFEGUARD Act increasing Congressional oversight of how all recipients of U.S. military aid (not just Israel) use that aid to ensure it isn’t used for violation of basic human rights.

* Do not hand Prime Minster Netanyahu the political prize of entry into the U.S. Visa Waiver Program unless he carries out his promises to stop the mistreatment of Arab-Americans visiting Israel and the West Bank and end the impunity of the settlers who attack Palestinian Americans in the West Bank without consequences. (This was a point we heard multiple times from our Israeli family and friends.)

Unfortunately, AIPAC and some other supposedly pro-Israel lobbyists oppose or remain silent on all of these points, even speaking out recently against the Biden administration’s decision in June to reverse the last-minute Trump gift to the West Bank annexation movement of allowing settlements to qualify for U.S. scientific and agricultural grant programs.

These days, being pro-Israel requires setting clear and consistent limits on what the American Jewish community and the U.S. government will support. In fact, the Israeli pro-democracy movement is counting on it — and can’t win unless we do.

Moreover, many believe even Netanyahu himself would welcome being able to say no to his most extreme partners, but he needs to be able to point to stronger American policies to justify it.

And then there’s lesson #3:

Once this crisis is resolved, we can’t let things return to the way they were.

On July 24th, the Netanyahu coalition passed the first part of the judicial “reform” program, limiting the ability of judges to overturn government actions by application of the extreme unreasonableness standard. The Israel Democracy Institute has said this law “will significantly undermine the ability to ensure that the principles of ethical behavior and lack of corruption are maintained in the public sector.”

We in the American Jewish community need to accept our share of responsibility for the fact that Israel has gone off the rails (in the words of recent U.S. ambassador Tom Nides) as much as it has. By remaining silent for too long, we enabled the rise of the Bezalel Smotriches and Itamar Ben-Gvirs of Israeli politics, whose voters interpreted our silence as consent in their extraordinarily destructive policies — destructive both to Israel’s Jewish and democratic character.

But as bad as things are, they can still get even worse. Other elements in the judicial overhaul include giving the current coalition unlimited power to appoint judges and overturn judicial decisions, further undermining the significance of the judiciary as an independent branch of government.

When we say the Al Chet prayer this Yom Kippur, we need to acknowledge our sins of omission and commission and resolve to do better now and in the future. Given the direction of Israeli demographics, our role in helping set democratic guardrails will only become more important over time.

A graduate of Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community Day School and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Matthew Weinstein serves as a member of the J Street Baltimore Chapter Steering Committee.