Israelism and the Current Moment

Israelism: Phenomenal or Flop?

A former congregant of mine (who happens to be an excellent psychologist) recently pointed out that writing seems to act for me as “a great tonic against the heartbreak and tears we are all facing.” It’s an insightful comment that I can’t help but agree with. For me, writing and processing have always been two sides of the same coin. With one major exception, though, I’ve avoided writing directly about the current situation in Israel. Like most North American Jews, I struggled with finding the right words and came to the silent conclusion that there was nothing I could offer to the conversation that couldn’t be said better by someone else who was more directly impacted. Recent days, though, gave me an opportunity that I can’t help but reflect on.

I attended the virtual screening of a recent award-winning documentary called Israelism. Directed by Jewish filmmakers Erin Axelman and Sam Eilersteen, it tells the following story:

When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians, their lives take sharp left turns. They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.

The film also features voices like Jacqui, a Jewish educator who says “Judaism is Israel and Israel is Judaism”, and former Anti-Defamation League President Abe Foxman, who claims voices like Simone and Eitan’s represent a small minority. Thought leaders like Peter Beinart, Jeremy Ben-Ami, Noura Erakat, Cornel West, and Noam Chomsky also weigh in.

Those two American Jews are If Not Now co-founder Simone Zimmerman and disillusioned IDF Veteran Eitan, who became horrified that “the Jewish institutions that raised them not only lied but built their Jewish identity around that lie.” (The film also implicitly tells the filmmakers’ own stories, as stated in an interview on the Judaism Unbound podcast). From a technical point, the film was incredibly well-made and remarkably effective at telling its story. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s a must-watch for anyone who wants to really understand the mindset of American Jewish anti-Zionism. If the live chat at my screening is representative, viewers were split roughly evenly between Jews and Muslims in addition to some curious others. Dialogue in the chat was refreshingly civil for the entire 85 minute run-time and everyone at my showing seemed to genuinely want peace rather than bloodshed.

David Roytenberg of the Canadian Zionist Forum recently wrote his own review of the film, and I found his primary critiques to be on-point:

Although the film contains lengthy interviews of a number of enthusiastic supporters of Israel it uses these interviews only to establish the strong support of American Jewish institutions for Israel. These people are not asked for their views on the film’s central narrative, on which they would certainly have challenged some of the film’s claims and offered dissenting opinions…

The film is utterly blind to the fact that while conflating Jewish organizations with the promotion of the extreme right in America, it is giving oxygen to the rapidly spreading antisemitism of the extreme left. In particular, the idea that Jews identifying antisemitism within the anti-Israel left are arguing in bad faith in order to silence criticism of Israel is a core message of the film…

The film also suggests through the voice of its Palestinian spokesperson, that America’s Jewish community may have the power to change the attitude of Israel’s leadership and even that of the American government. As mentioned in the earlier critique of the film’s trailer and poster, this exaggerated notion of Jewish power is a classic antisemitic trope.

That is why I ultimately came out of the film with a bad taste in my mouth. Is there room for North American Jews to question and challenge the hasbarah that we were raised with? Yes. Is there room to push back against the fact that, as one Modern Orthodox colleague of mine wrote, “for some Jews, Israel has replaced God” and that “reducing Judaism to Israeli politics is misunderstanding the gestalt of Judaism itself”? Absolutely. But that has to be done without giving into antisemitic tropes ourselves and without letting it slide from those who claim to want peace. Hatred, bigotry, and the like from anyone ought not be tolerated on any level. While I truly believe that there is a line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, it has proven to be remarkably thin. To paraphrase one Tweet I saw, “those who don’t think Jews should live in Israel have a weird way of letting us know we’re welcome elsewhere.”

If we truly want dialogue, provocative films are not enough. Dialogue requires good faith and if we do not unambiguously condemn antisemitism (and islamophobia, for that matter), then nothing remotely productive can get off the ground to begin with. When I looked at the public Facebook profiles of the non-Zionist voices featured in the film, I was disappointed to see that none of them condemned the October 7 massacre by Hamas. The closest came from Professor Cornel West, who wrote on October 8 that “the U.S. government, the Israeli government, and the occupied Hamas forces have blood on their hands. We must fight for the masses of Palestinians and Israelis to live with dignity and security! As I have always said, a precious Palestinian child has the same value as a precious Israeli child!”

Tikun Olam Productions and the Israelism filmmakers put out a social media statement on October 13 (seemingly absent from their website), which postponed screenings through October 15 and said the following:

Our team includes American Jews, Palestinians, and Israelis. Most of us have family and friends in grave danger in the Holy Land. Many members of our community have lost someone, or know someone who has been kidnapped. We are grieving and outraged at the horrific loss of life and dehumanizing rhetoric and actions that we have witnessed over the past days. Both peoples deserve to be free and safe…

We made Israelism to facilitate a difficult conversation about the American Jewish community’s relationship to Israel and Palestine. The film explores the feeling among many young American Jews that their community did not prepare them for this conversation, or give them the full truth about Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians. Israelism explores the missing context that has led us to what we are witnessing today.

We feel this conversation is as critical now as ever, and it is a conversation we can have with empathy, while also holding our grief and horror at all war crimes and acts of cruelty. We firmly believe that the only way forward to safety for all people in the land is addressing root causes, and imagining together what it means to move forward towards a future without unending occupation - a future of liberation, justice, and full equality.

We are committed to carrying this conversation forward together as we pray and strive for an end to the horrors we are witnessing.

The best way that I can personally respond to this sort of mentality is with the recent words of Rabbi Shai Held:

First, people need to confront the reality of who and what Hamas is, of their genocidal (the real kind) fantasies… anyone who cares about the people of Gaza, and about Palestinians and Israelis in general-- as human beings rather than ideological tropes-- has to face the reality that for Hamas, this has never been about the Occupation. They have been telling us for decades that their goal is to destroy Israel and kill Jews. And they mean it. If your only response to the events of October 7 is to say, Israel should end the Occupation, you are living in a kind of epistemological closure.

Now, it is true that poverty, hopelessness, and occupation drive (some) people to radical, extremist, toxic ideologies and I do think, as I always have, that there will need to be a Palestinian State one day in which Palestinians can l[i]ve in freedom and dignity. But one cannot make this happen with one's eyes closed, and one cannot wish away the impact Hamas has had on many, many Gazans… An entire generation has been brought up in Hamas schools. The most humane thing is to help purge the death-loving and death-dealing ideology that has so poisoned the wells of Gaza.

Without unambiguous condemnation of Hamas by name, or at least equal condemnation to what they give the IDF, I’m afraid that this film will not truly be able to facilitate the difficult, challenging, and critical conversations that it so desperately wants to. It will only show that Zionists are right to worry about their non-Zionist and anti-Zionist peers falling into the very antisemitism that they claim to stand so strongly against. That is why Israelism may one day be an important film for all Jews, but abjectly fails in the current moment.

May we see the day when war and bloodshed cease, when a great peace will embrace the whole world. Then nation will not threaten nation, and the human family will not again know war.