Kelley Kidd
I am an American liberal and a Jew. Until recently I have only very seldom experienced any inner conflict between those two identities. But in the middle of the conflict between Israel and its enemies, I have witnessed a growing tendency of my many fellow American liberals to disparage both Israel and those Jews who are supportive of Israel. Many American progressives have blamed the current bloodshed in the Middle East on Israel, and many have called upon the Biden administration to punish Israel by withholding any aid to Israel and they have also demanded that public and private institutions to withdraw from any dealings with Israel. They have called Israel a genocidal state and Biden a genocidal president. I find these positions to be betrayals of the principles American liberals have stood for in the past. I believe many who hold those views do so more out of ignorance than deep seated hatred for Jews. Many mistakenly have reached conclusions based on false premises and assumptions.
The roots of Western liberal thought lie in the religious values of Jews which they developed in what is now Palestine and Israel. Authors of many different persuasions have often noted the huge role that Jews have played in creating the best values of Europeans and Americans, values held most dearly by self styled liberals and progressives. But the truth of those Jewish roots has often escaped the education of the people who adhere to those values. The realities of both Western and Eastern life for Jews has been soaked in contempt, persecution and persecution.
For many long decades the Jews themselves were often omitted in the actual policies of would-be liberal republics. Only after the genocide of the Nazis and their collaborators had become visible to the world did the United States begin to become a nation whose Jews were accepted as welcome participants in virtually all political and social institutions. The holocaust also elevated the suffering of Jews to become a wrong that merited actions to support Jewish efforts to free themselves from anti-Jewish exclusion and discrimination. But during and after that murder of millions of Jews the United States still failed to expand its permission for the immigration of Jews which could have saved hundreds of thousands. The rest of the world turned its back on fleeing Jewish refugees.
The one place where Jews were welcomed was in the British controlled former province of Turkey–Palestine. That welcome came from the half million Jews who lived there, most of whom had moved from other countries under the banner of an aspiration called “Zionism”. Earlier persecution of Jews in both Western and Eastern Europe had led to a political movement which sought a political expression of the continuing religious yearning for Jews to live in perfect peace in “the Holy Land” In other words Zionism sought to restore to Jews freedom in the “Promised Land” stolen from them by successive imperialisms from ancient Babylon and Greece and Rome to later Turkey and Britain, After 1939 even the previously friendly attitude of Britain turned to efforts to severely restrict Jewish immigration from the holocaust. Nevertheless by the end of World War II Palestine’s Zionist Jews gave refugees the one place in the world where other Jews eagerly welcomed them
At this moment the nation of Israel represents both that national aspiration and the descendants of those Jewish refugees from that genocide. Israel’s citizens also include millions of Jews from other nations, including over 700,000 from Arab countries and their descendants. Strong opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine has been evident and extremely violent since before the holocaust. Its organized expression has come in recent years from several Arab states and from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Moslem Brotherhood, the Houthis, ISIS, Islamic Jihad and the government of Iran.
About half of the Jews on this planet live in the “Zionist” state of Israel. Any violent threat to the existence and military potency of Israel is of course a threat to the survival of those Jews. Zionism of course was simply the advocacy for the creation of a government which would be both democratic and majority Jewish. Today Zionism is simply advocacy for the survival and potency of Israel. A self styled liberal who advocates for the destruction of Israel is also calling for the genocide of Israel’s Jews. There i nothing liberal or compassionate in any sense of demonizing Zionists.
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Journal of Public Law 