Pro-Palestine American Jews, you've been had

(JNS) — Among those who forcibly occupied Trump Tower recently to protest the deportation of a violent antisemite, were members of the Jewish Voice for Peace, who, along with other far-left groups like IfNotNow, have been parading support for Hamas since its Oct. 7 attack. The scene was a chilling reminder of the giant rift splitting American Jewry.

On one side of this rift are American Jews of all denominations, including secular ones, who love Israel as our ancestral homeland and the United States as the greatest country on earth.

On the other side are Jews who have embraced the globalist concept of tikkun olam, “making the world a better place,” as the central or only tenet of their Judaism. 

Over the decades, the tikkun olam Jews spoke out for those less fortunate. After all, American Jews have been at the forefront of fighting for labor, for women’s rights, for other minorities and civil rights, and, in the past, for other Jews.

But some of these Jews have warped the ideal of tikkun olam beyond all recognition. They see Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as a Jewish sin. They believe that if Israel was a little bit nicer, a little more tolerant to the Palestinians and gave them just a little more land, then, one day, the jihadists would see how great the Jews and Israelis are and lay down their weapons. Palestinians would accept Western liberal values, and we would all live in a utopic one-state fantasyland without any borders.

These Jews continue to nurse this vision despite repeated Palestinian rejections of any kind of peace treaty. In 2005, the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon even pulled every single Jew from Gaza. Instead of peace, the response has been rockets and rape.

They falsely claim that in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, that the Jewish state is committing a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and starving the population. This, despite the fact that Israel has helped administer half-million polio vaccines to children in Gaza and Hamas members have been caught stealing the food deliveries.

To tikkun olam Jews, though, it’s all Israel’s fault. How could this be?

Baby boomer Jews tended to grow up in two different kinds of households. One had parents who were Zionists. They saw the foundation of the State of Israel, after 2,000 years of exile and the murder of Six Million of their brothers and sisters in the Holocaust, as a miracle they were lucky enough to behold with their own eyes.

The other households were made up of Communist Jews, who, to beef up their Marxist credentials, shed their religion and their American patriotism. Tikkun olam fit very nicely in this worldview and let them hold on to nominal Jewishness. Abandoning their Jewish ethnicity and belief helped them conform to the greater global cause of anti-capitalist revolution.

The tikkun Olam Jews’ disconnect from liturgy has led to a near-total ignorance of canonical Judaism, despite their claim that “we know our history.” They do not, which explains their comfort in claiming that Jews have no connection to Israel and that we are just “settler colonists” in the Jewish homeland. Yet, the longing to return to Zion has been integral to Judaism since the Babylonian exile of 586 B.C., (see Psalm 137, for example) more than 1,100 years before the birth of Islam.

My grandfather was a pioneer in the development of lecithin, an innovation that led to the production of dried food like powdered eggs, which helped feed American troops as they battled the Nazis during World War II. Even so, my grandfather told me that with a last name like “Goldenberg,” he could not get work as a chemist.

Until 1948.

That’s when Americans witnessed Jewish strength for the first time as bedraggled Zionist underdogs fought off seven Arab armies to win Israeli independence. The average American started to respect Jews, and Jews entered the mainstream of American society. Jews also started to be thought of as white.

The United States would soon develop a military alliance with Israel that field-tested American military hardware against the Soviet-armed Arabs.

In 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, Israel hammered Arab armies and provided the United States with invaluable lessons and even Soviet hardware like an intact MiG-21.

Soviet propaganda spun against Israel, and once the Soviet Union collapsed, the annihilationist ideology of radical Islam took its place as the threat to the free world. Israel and the United States, both incompatible with Sharia law, continued to find themselves on the same side of the fight.

Zionist and tikkun olam Jews had an uneasy relationship, invisible from mainstream America for decades. Since Oct. 7, however, this fault line has ruptured into full view. Tikkun olam Jews are so committed to sacrificing themselves on the misplaced altar of white guilt that they see all Palestinians as victims, no matter their words or actions. They blame Israel for the sins of Islamist terrorists. They blame America. They blame themselves.

Ironically, socialist Jews are now the useful idiots of jihadists.

I walk around campus these days through a gauntlet of faculty and students proclaiming their wish to rid the world of Jews and destroy Israel. I go online and see colleagues and people I consider friends wishing for the same. Professors take over the faculty senate to share

their dreams of destroying Israel and then complain that they have no free speech. It’s become daily life on campus. I now understand the Jewish concept of L’dor v’dor, “From generation to generation.”

Brett Kaufman is assistant professor of the Classics at University of Illinois, and co-founder of Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism.