The Dissolution of the Pro-Israel Consensus Within US Jewish Community: What Is Taking Shape Today.

It has been the deadly assault of 7 October 2023, an event that shook global Jewish populations like no other occurrence following the founding of the Jewish state.

Among Jewish people it was deeply traumatic. For the Israeli government, the situation represented a significant embarrassment. The entire Zionist project rested on the presumption which held that Israel would prevent things like this occurring in the future.

A response appeared unavoidable. However, the particular response undertaken by Israel – the obliteration of the Gaza Strip, the casualties of numerous non-combatants – constituted a specific policy. This particular approach complicated the perspective of many American Jews understood the October 7th events that set it in motion, and it now complicates the community's commemoration of the day. How can someone grieve and remember an atrocity affecting their nation in the midst of devastation done to another people connected to their community?

The Challenge of Grieving

The challenge of mourning lies in the circumstance where little unity prevails about the implications of these developments. In fact, for the American Jewish community, the recent twenty-four months have witnessed the collapse of a decades-long consensus regarding Zionism.

The early development of Zionist agreement within US Jewish communities can be traced to writings from 1915 written by a legal scholar subsequently appointed high court jurist Louis Brandeis titled “The Jewish Problem; Finding Solutions”. Yet the unity really takes hold following the six-day war in 1967. Before then, Jewish Americans contained a delicate yet functioning parallel existence among different factions that had diverse perspectives about the requirement for a Jewish nation – Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists.

Background Information

That coexistence persisted during the post-war decades, through surviving aspects of Jewish socialism, through the non-aligned American Jewish Committee, within the critical American Council for Judaism and similar institutions. Regarding Chancellor Finkelstein, the leader at JTS, Zionism had greater religious significance than political, and he forbade the singing of Hatikvah, the national song, during seminary ceremonies in those years. Furthermore, Zionist ideology the central focus within modern Orthodox Judaism before the six-day war. Jewish identitarian alternatives remained present.

But after Israel routed adjacent nations during the 1967 conflict that year, seizing land comprising the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Jerusalem's eastern sector, the American Jewish relationship to Israel underwent significant transformation. Israel’s victory, along with enduring anxieties of a “second Holocaust”, led to an increasing conviction in the country’s vital role to the Jewish people, and a source of pride regarding its endurance. Discourse concerning the extraordinary aspect of the success and the freeing of territory provided the movement a spiritual, even messianic, importance. During that enthusiastic period, a significant portion of the remaining ambivalence about Zionism vanished. In that decade, Publication editor Podhoretz famously proclaimed: “Everyone supports Zionism today.”

The Consensus and Restrictions

The unified position left out Haredi Jews – who typically thought a Jewish state should only be ushered in by a traditional rendering of the messiah – but united Reform, Conservative Judaism, Modern Orthodox and most unaffiliated individuals. The common interpretation of the consensus, what became known as progressive Zionism, was established on the idea about the nation as a progressive and free – while majority-Jewish – country. Many American Jews considered the control of Palestinian, Syria's and Egyptian lands post-1967 as temporary, assuming that a resolution was imminent that would guarantee Jewish demographic dominance within Israel's original borders and neighbor recognition of the nation.

Two generations of American Jews were thus brought up with Zionism a fundamental aspect of their Jewish identity. The state transformed into an important element of Jewish education. Israel’s Independence Day became a Jewish holiday. Israeli flags adorned many temples. Summer camps integrated with national melodies and the study of the language, with visitors from Israel instructing American youth national traditions. Travel to Israel expanded and peaked via educational trips during that year, when a free trip to Israel was provided to young American Jews. The nation influenced almost the entirety of the American Jewish experience.

Changing Dynamics

Interestingly, during this period following the war, Jewish Americans developed expertise at religious pluralism. Open-mindedness and communication between Jewish denominations expanded.

Except when it came to the Israeli situation – there existed diversity ended. One could identify as a rightwing Zionist or a leftwing Zionist, however endorsement of the nation as a Jewish state was a given, and challenging that narrative placed you beyond accepted boundaries – an “Un-Jew”, as one publication termed it in an essay recently.

However currently, under the weight of the devastation in Gaza, food shortages, dead and orphaned children and frustration regarding the refusal of many fellow Jews who refuse to recognize their involvement, that unity has disintegrated. The centrist pro-Israel view {has lost|no longer