The two most important collectives of the Jewish Nation – the US Jewish community and the citizens of Israel – are being swept off in opposite directions. In times where attention is being diverted – both in Isreal and in the US – toward a host of more pressing and dramatic issues, a worrying trend is slowly taking root, building a negative and definitive framework between these two communities.
Soon, there will come an answer to the severe threat to public health; the economic crisis will pass after causing severe social damage; and the issue of sovereignty and its implications is also simply another case in a host of crises, achievements, and setbacks that we have seen in recent decades that will eventually pass.
However, in contrast, the tension between the mainstream American Jewry and Israel will probably only get worse in the foreseeable future. There are two unavoidable processes at work: one positive as far as Zionism is concerned, but hard to swallow, especially in America. The second is the increasingly different lived experiences of Jews in Israel and in the US, leading to increasing polarization between the two communities.
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The giddying demographic success of Zionism has shaped the first process by which the primacy of the Jewish community has shifted since the Second World War from US Jews to Israel. On the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, just six percent of world Jewry lived in Israel; today – almost half of them. In the 1980s, Jews in Israel were around half the number of Jews in the US. Today, there are over a million Jews more here than there. The huge difference between the assimilation and Jewish birthrate indicates a trend of waning American Jewish primacy and the fortifying of Israel as the definitive center of gravity for the Jewish nation. This is irreversible. For many years now, Israel has held this place because of its sovereign status in the homeland, and recently this has also extended to cultural output. The state is now completely free from depending on the generosity of US Jews, as was seen in the first decades of its establishment. US Jews importance in mobilizing strategic support for Israel is in continual decline.
The second process, as noted, is linked to the polarizing differences in life experience between the two main centers of the Jewish Nation: between those who live in the homeland, in a violent, volatile, and hostile environment; and those whose experience is that of a prosperous minority with a socio-economic status that can afford to have a more optimistic and laid-back world view of human behavior in their country and around the world.
Life experience and disappointments have made the Israeli mainstream much more suspicious and more likely to protect itself with greater security margins and willingness to use force for self-defense – even if it doesn't look good. Aware of the manipulative character of its enemies and the sanctimoniousness of some of those who claim to be its friends, it has learned to trust its own force and discretion, and has understood that punishment and condemnation of those who wish "to save Israel from itself" is less difficult to deal with than the insufferable cost of accepting their bizarre suggestions. The Jewish public's trust in the factions that preached an attractive reconciliatory approach has dwindled since the days of the peace euphoria in the early 1990s, and collapsed entirely since the Second Intifada almost 20 years ago. Its few remnants have been pushed to the fringes of the political map.
American Jews are moving in the opposite direction. They have always been part of the liberal political faction, as part of their campaign for equal rights for minorities. The mainstream, except for the Orthodox, remained there even after the community established itself amongst the elites. During the polarization that American society has gone through in recent decades, the conservatives and liberals have entrenched themselves in their distinct world views. The "Cold Civil War" between these two wings during Trump's presidency has also led Democrats – just as happened to the Republicans since the Tea Party – to radicalize their "progressive" views, which are very similar to the views of the European elites. These "progressive" views are linked to a deep and severe critique of even what the majority of the Israeli public and every government that gains its trust (not only what is described as "Netanyahu's extreme right-wing government") sees as necessary for the security of Israel.
The tension between these two outlooks, their understanding of reality, and the definition of the borders of legitimacy between the mainstream of these Jewish collectives on both sides of the ocean is worth paying attention to, especially given the possibility of the Democrats returning to the White House and Biden trying to pressure Israel and isolate it just as the Obama administration did.
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