Mitchell Plitnick
Mondoweiss / July 5, 2024
Liberal Zionists are trying to rehabilitate Israel’s image among young U.S. Jews after the Gaza genocide by appealing for “nuance” and sending them to indoctrination camps. But these attempts ring more hollow than ever.
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has permanently altered the politics of the broader issue of Palestine and Israel. Exactly what the political landscape will look like in every sector — Gaza, the West Bank, the Palestinian diaspora, the full spectrum within Israel, the global Jewish community, and even the halls of power in Washington, Brussels, and throughout the Arab world — is impossible to know until the slaughter stops. But we can see some of the challenges that each sector will be grappling with even now.
One of the most profound will be the so-called “liberal Zionist” camp in the Jewish community outside of Israel. That group based its political activities on the argument that Israel and the Palestinians were both at fault for various missteps over the years, but that Zionism was essentially in the right when it claimed rights to Palestine.
This sector believed that the past could be left to the past and that a 78%-22% split of the land that was called Mandatory Palestine before 1948 between two national groups who were essentially the same size was a just resolution. All the Palestinians had to do, in this view, was forego the right of return, forget all that had happened, and accept these “generous offers.”
But October 7 shattered that view. Many of those “liberal Zionists” now saw Palestinians as inherently violent Jew-haters. They would admit that Palestinians, especially in Gaza, had been poorly treated, but they believe the October 7 attack showed that the militant factions could not be dealt with rationally.
Many in this camp backed every Israeli excess for months after that attack, and even more, said that the attack was proof that Israelis and Palestinians couldn’t live together and that destroying Hamas was a sine qua non for any future agreement. Some, after months of horror, admitted that Israel was acting excessively. But they continued to agree that Hamas could not be suffered to exist, with all the violence that implied. They might not like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, but they did not insist that the Israeli right — responsible for far more bloodshed before and after October 7, throughout Palestine, not only in Gaza — could no longer exist. Only Hamas’ existence could not be tolerated, while Israeli murderers could simply be opposed.
As much of the liberal camp has slid into support and apologia for Israel’s genocidal campaign, they are facing a problem: their own children. We know very well that a significant portion of young American Jews recognize and oppose not only Israel’s genocide but its apartheid nature as well. Others may not fall into that group, but they are finding it difficult to defend Israel’s actions, especially in the face of peers who are hearing, for the first time, directly from Palestinians about what they endure.
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the former head of the Union of Reform Judaism, recently proposed a solution to this problem in Haaretz. Yoffie wants to move Israeli education from Jewish schools and synagogues into Jewish summer camps.
The idea is to do pro-Israel indoctrination in a warm, natural atmosphere, thereby providing a positive association with Israel. That, clearly, is best accomplished in the American wilderness, far away from the realities of apartheid.
But the real meat of Yoffie’s idea is to better prepare young Jewish Americans with proper talking points that they can use with their peers. He decries the current atmosphere at Zionist summer camps where they avoid, in his view, the hard political questions and instead nurture “openness to differing points of views. They speak of ‘multiple narratives’ and ‘safe environments’ where everyone feels free to say what they want. And whatever views you have are just fine, no matter where they fall on the ideological spectrum.”
Instead of this, which Yoffie considers “wishy-washy nonsense,” he states that “The time has come for Jewish camps to discard their obsession with ‘unity’ and ‘solidarity’ and to set aside their bizarre reluctance to talk about the political issues that are at the very heart of the Israel-Palestine debate.”
Yoffie wants young Jews to get a “nuanced” view of Zionism and Israel, one which is different from the “Israel-as-Disneyland” image that he feels Jewish kids have been filled with and leaves them unable to defend Israel against supporters of Palestinian rights.
So what does Yoffie suggest these young Jews be taught about Israel? It can essentially be described as indoctrination by propaganda and a renewal and reinforcement of the boundaries of acceptable thought for young Jews.
As to the specifics of his plan, you have to get all the way to the end of his op-ed to find out, but he finally does lay out what this teaching should consist of, and it is disturbingly familiar and detached from the reality of Israel. His “curriculum” consists of the following:
“A belief in a Jewish and democratic Israel; a commitment to a two-state reality where both Israelis and Palestinians can live securely and in peace; a rejection of Kahanist lunacy and radical settler ideology; an unshakeable love of Zion; an affirmation of the need for Israeli power of deterrence; a promise of individual equality and human rights for all citizens of the Jewish state; non-stop effort to ease and ultimately end the occupation; and a declaration of permanent resistance to Hamas and its Iranian sponsors who engage in acts of genocidal murder against the Jewish people.”
Anyone familiar with pro-Israel talking points will immediately see there’s nothing new here. But in the context of a post-October 7 world, these talking points ring hollower than ever.
They are, of course, an old-fashioned set of liberal, pro-Israel talking points, the kind AIPAC and ADL used to encourage before they decided to follow the Israeli government down a more overtly racist line.
The enforced notion of two states being the only alternative begins the list. If Yoffie was serious, he would also take on the clear reality that Israel has made this solution impossible. They have done this on the ground through settlement expansion, but that is only the headline. They have fully integrated the settlements into Israel’s network, power grid, and other infrastructure. They have worked assiduously to destroy legal and political distinctions between Israel and the settlements, so that by now, while politicians may talk about two states, their actual policies are forced to treat the entire West Bank, outside of isolated Palestinian Bantustans, as part of Israel. Whether one ever supported a two-state solution or not, there can be no conversation without including these realities.
Trying to isolate the Kahanists and settlers makes for a fine discussion over coffee in a Washington suburb, but it elides the fact that these forces do not represent a radical fringe in Israel anymore. They are the government, they are far more influential in the military than they ever were before, and they are not limited to the Jewish Power or Religious Zionism parties. They are very much a core part of Likud as well, a party that remains one of, and in some polls, the single largest party in Israel despite its monumental failures. The young generation of Israelis, unlike young Jews in the West, are more likely to subscribe to these far-right views than their parents.
Then there is the “unshakeable love of Zion.” This is simply breeding more fanaticism. It attempts to reinforce both the rewriting of Jewish history and the redefinition of Zion. As I have explained elsewhere, the concept of Zion in Judaism for most of our history was not about a return to the land but about redemption by God. Absent religion, it would have held very little meaning to Jews of bygone eras. True Zion is not about land; it is about redemption in the eyes of God.
What Yoffie is referring to is secular nationalism, one of the most pernicious and deadly forces in post-Enlightenment human history. Young people who hold universal values of human rights, justice, and equality, are inherently rejecting, whether they realize it or not, the madness of nationalism in general and of Zionism specifically. Yoffie would reverse that process. That does not lead to peace for anyone but to more oppression and violence.
While Yoffie urges an end to the occupation, he doesn’t want young Jews to understand the decades of intentional dispossession that are rooted in the very ideology of Political Zionism, from Theodor Herzl through Netanyahu. He wants to reinforce the Israeli militancy that has been the fundamental characteristic of Israel since its birth. He even endorses an endless war, not peacemaking or diplomacy, with Hamas, Iran, and anyone who works against Israel’s ambitions or to counter Israeli militarism.
Even clearer is what Yoffie omits. He does not want young Jews to understand the Palestinian attachment to the land, the multi-ethnic history of this piece of land over the millennia, or the real cost of dispossession that started long before 1948 and which, as we know from the words of Israel’s founding parents themselves, was always a key component of the Zionist enterprise.
In Yoffie’s view, young American Jews should be taught about “Arab nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Israel’s complex democracy (and) the emergence of extremist strands in Zionist thinking.”
You can see the formulation right there. It is about Arab intransigence and intolerance. Whether secular, like the PLO, or religious, like Hamas, Palestinian resistance is entirely illegitimate. Israel’s massive violence, by contrast, is always self-defense, and, if it should sometimes go too far, well, that’s just because of a few bad Kahanist apples with disproportionate influence.
Yoffie wants to send more and more young Jews out to convince their non-Jewish peers of the justice of Israel’s cause with the same old, tired talking points that have, over decades of frustration and duplicity, brought us to where we are today.
As I have written, one cannot be “progressive except for Palestine,” and it is the decades of efforts in that direction by the United States, and Europe in their approach to Israel that have brought us to the horrific days we see now.
The young Jews Yoffie is wringing his hands over know far better than he does how to build a peaceful future, and that it can only be accomplished in a post-Zionist world. They know the hope that universal values can bring to Palestine-Israel, and they can see the failure of Yoffie’s propaganda and hypocrisy very well for themselves.
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy; he is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
