American Jewry, State Power and the Growth of Settler Judaism

Marc H. Ellis is University Professor of American and Jewish Studies and Director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University, Texas. His most recent book, Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes: The Search for Jewish Identity in the Τwenty-First Century, was published this year by Pluto Press.

In August 2001, I flew into Christchurch, New Zealand, from Sydney, Australia, the last stop on a worldwide speaking tour I called “Quest for Justice”. I had been speaking on the Israel–Palestine issue in light of the current al-Aqsa intifada, seeking to raise consciousness of the Israeli violation of the human and national rights of Palestinians.

 

As a Jew, born in America and steeped, like other Jews of my post-Holocaust generation, in an ethics of fair play and justice, I have been distressed by the continuing and escalating belligerency of Israel. The use of Israeli helicopter gunships against defenceless Palestinian cities, towns, villages and refugee camps angered me. I could not remain silent.

 

During this tour, I addressed several Jewish organisations, including a meeting of Liberal rabbis in the United Kingdom, a Jewish group in Melbourne and a Jewish studies class at New South Wales University in Sydney. I also met with a number of Jews in the countries I visited, including Israeli Jews, and the concern is shared: have we as Jews become an oppressor nation? Have the lessons of the Holocaust, which we teach religiously to everyone in the world, been lost to us? Is the threat and use of power and might—via helicopter gunships hovering over Palestinian skies by day and firing their rockets by night—the legacy we want to bequeath to our children?

 

Though the rewards of such speaking tours are many, the jarring notes are what I remember most, the verbal and non-verbal confrontations, most often with Jews, who remind me that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is central to Jewish history and to the Jewish future.

 

At the University of Canterbury in Christchurch I had one such encounter. On the first day of the visit, I was asked to attend a class with a visiting Jewish Israeli scholar and political activist, Yossi Olmert. That evening I was scheduled to appear with him on a panel on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

 

It turns out that Dr Olmert is the brother of the mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert; both are nationalists and on the right of the Israeli political spectrum in the mode of Menachem Begin, Benjamin Netanyahu and the current prime minister, Ariel Sharon. The Israeli embassy in New Zealand had brought Olmert over as part of his more extensive tour of Asia and the Pacific. These tours attempted to counter the negative publicity that has surfaced during Israel’s military campaign to quell the al-Aqsa intifada.

The Bully in Christchurch

As a nationalist and self-proclaimed right-winger, Olmert claims the land of Israel to include not only Jerusalem but the West Bank as well, a region he referred to in his lecture as Judea and Samaria. The Greater Land of Israel is indeed Olmert’s claim, as the biblical promise and the early claims of Israel and the land are seen to be in force. That Palestinians have lived and still live in these areas is for Olmert an inconvenient factor perhaps derailing, at least for now, the fulfilment of this claim. In no way does it provide the Palestinians with a rival claim to the one he makes.

 

As for Jerusalem, the city whose destruction Jews continued to lament and for a return to which they prayed during more than two thousand years of diaspora, the Jewish claim is non-negotiable. Palestinians have rights to pray at the mosques in Jerusalem. Palestinian rights end there. As for the assassinations of Palestinians, a freely admitted policy of the Sharon government carried out through the diverse means of detonated mobile phones and helicopter gunships, Olmert is firm in describing these acts as reprisals for terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. They are not only justified, they should continue and perhaps even be accelerated.

 

What is remarkable about Olmert is not his ideas. He combines the superficial analysis of the Arab world and simplification of Jewish rights to the land of Israel–Palestine that have become commonplace in nationalist/right-wing circles in Israel over the last decades. Though Olmert is careful to distance himself from the assassination in 1995 of Israel’s then–prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, an event he describes as shameful, I feel his analysis is quite close to that of Yigal Amir, Rabin’s assassin. Amir speaks of Arabs and Palestinians in ways not too dissimilar from Olmert’s own rhetoric.

 

Indeed, as the class continued with a lively question and answer period, Olmert became more and more animated and sweeping in his generalisations. Arabs and Muslims were defined in increasingly negative terms, and outsiders to the Middle East, including New Zealanders and Americans (not exempting Jews who live outside Israel) were taunted for daring to suggest to Israel ethical and moral alternatives to its present way of behaving. These “outsiders” always criticised Israel but did not live in its “neighbourhood” and did not pay the price in blood and tears. Israel and the Palestinians should go it alone and the suggestion that Israel is within an international system of nation-states with laws and obligations, and is dependent on the United States for financial and military support, was dismissed with disdain.

 

This disdain struck me as essential to Olmert’s worldview. As the evening panel discussion drew near, I feared that this would result in an uneven discussion in which the very principles that I hold dear—the centrality of justice and ethics to Judaism and Jewish life—would be characterised as utopian and derided as silly, or as a recipe for disaster for Israel and Jews who lived within her borders. After all, isn’t every violation of order and decency in the Middle East a violation by Arabs who, if they had the power, would drive the Jews into the sea? Isn’t that the aim of every Arab on the street and every Arab government now until the end of time? Aren’t moral arguments made on behalf of the Palestinians actually hypocritical veiled attacks that carry the ominous prospect of another Holocaust?

 

As it turned out, I was right about the panel. Olmert dominated the discussion as if he were the only participant. Not only did he speak far longer than his allotted time, he resisted any attempt to stop him. As his orations grew longer, his vehemence increased. He seemed obsessed with the era before the 1967 Israeli–Arab war when Jordan occupied East Jerusalem, and the Wailing Wall, the last remnant of the ancient Jewish Temple, was littered with trash and urinated on by animals. Today, of course, Jews dominate this part of Jerusalem and guarantee the freedom of Muslims to worship. But to the question of what freedom is accorded Muslim worshippers when Jerusalem is inaccessible to Palestinians who live outside the city and when the Palestinian population of the Old City is being systematically depleted, Olmert, whose brother implements these policies of restricted access and demographic change, simply reiterated in a more insistent voice the charges of Arab desecration of Jewish holy sites.

 

Rather than by debating skills or truth-telling, Olmert had dominated me and the audience with bullying tactics. This understanding of Olmert as a bully, remembering that bullies, without their entourage or, in the case of Israel, an overwhelming arms advantage, are essentially cowards, forced me to a deeper level of sadness with regard to Israel and its future. All Israelis are not bullies to be sure, but why was he brought on this speaking tour by the Israeli embassy? Why was an official from the embassy present and why did she seem so pleased with his words?

 

My encounter with Olmert occurred just a month before the 11 September 2024 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Did these attacks simply reinforce his position, that there is a link between Arabs and terrorism, a connection Israel knows well? Are the lessons that Olmert seeks to impart now “our” lessons? Do we now need to adopt the language of violence and retribution as the only language “we” and “they” understand?

Zionism and Holocaust/Israel

I view this encounter with the “bully in Christchurch” as a window into the Jewish world as it has evolved over the last decades. With the evolution and expansion of state power in Israel and the accelerated empowerment and achievement of elite influence in the United States, Jewish life around the world has been mobilised and militarised.

 

This trajectory, however, has often been misunderstood, characterised in fundamentalist religious terms and blamed on right-wing religious Jews in settlement movements around Jerusalem and the West Bank. Though they are not without blame—they certainly make worse the already difficult situation—Jewish fundamentalists are latecomers to Israel and the Jewish world. Olmert is a fellow traveller to Jewish fundamentalists, but also a latecomer. In fact, Israel and its continuing expansion are impossible to understand outside the liberal–European–secular Jewish narrative that promoted Israel’s creation and its consolidation as a nation-state.

 

This narrative combines a European context—a Jewish minority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that clearly saw the difficulties, if not impossibility, of Jewish life flourishing in modern Europe—with an evolving post-Holocaust consciousness that, especially in America after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, commemorates the Holocaust and understands the state of Israel as compensation for suffering and a guarantor of Jewish survival. If we label the European Jewish context Zionism and the American Jewish context Holocaust/Israel, we capture the central movements for the establishment and maintenance of Israel.

 

Clearly, both Zionism and Holocaust/Israel identification in their origins and continuity are complex and diverse. Historically, there have been Zionisms, from state Zionism to homeland Zionism and variations in between. Holocaust/Israel identification was weak in the 1950s and 1960s but strong during the late 1960s and 1970s. Today, Zionism has been overshadowed by Holocaust/Israel identification, as advanced by American Jewish economic and political elites.

 

The important point here is that in both Europe and America the main engines of Zionism and Holocaust/Israel identification have been decidedly secular, although in a particularly Jewish way. Here secularity can include devotion to the Jewish people, a reading of the Bible as an ongoing historical narrative, and a sense of historical destiny that includes nationality and peoplehood.

 

At the same time, the development of Zionism and Holocaust/Israel identification should be seen within an evolving liberal, sometimes socialist and often non- or anti-religious sensibility. The founders of Israel were decidedly secular and progressive in the European framework and were driven by an ethic they identified as Jewish in the broadest sense and internationalist in the humanist cause. Those who pioneered the Holocaust/Israel narrative in America were Jewish in sensibility and religious only in the broadest sense of the term. Their appeal to the larger Jewish community after the Holocaust was precisely due to the fact that Orthodox Judaism made little sense to Jews in America both because of the effects of modernity and the religious questions raised by the severity of the Holocaust. While Holocaust theologians could not agree on the presence of God during and after the Holocaust, they could agree that the central religious tasks of Jews after the Holocaust were remembering the Holocaust and building the state of Israel.

 

It is important to understand how the success of state Zionism and the intensification of the Holocaust/Israel narrative in America laid the groundwork for a secondary, though increasingly important, religiously extreme, settler movement, in tandem with a secular extreme nationalism, after the 1967 war. It was not until this period, on the heels of the capture and annexation of East Jerusalem and the occupation and settlement of the West Bank, that what we now call Jewish fundamentalism came to fruition. Jerusalem has obvious significance to both religious and secular Jews, but in the years following Israel’s victory the religious significance was emphasised. Like Jerusalem, the West Bank, known to religious Jews as Judea and Samaria, contained religious sites from ancient times. Complementing the Western Wall of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, the West Bank territories included the tombs of Abraham, Sarah and Rachel and other sites of religious and historical importance for Jews who aspired to reclaim and perhaps rebuild Jewish life in the promised land.

 

But the religious movements around Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria were moot with a victory in war and the subsequent planned settlements in these areas. In the crucial time-period after the 1967 war, the decision was made within the Israeli government to annex and expand Jerusalem, fortify it with settlements and expand further into the territories for political, economic and military reasons. Since religious fundamentalists have at no time dominated the Israeli government, the annexation of Jerusalem and the settlement of the West Bank should be seen as a calculated state expansion into areas where stakes could be claimed as the spoils of war and where no power could confront that expansion.

 

American foreign policy was also involved here, as it is today. Though the United States has never officially recognised the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem or the West Bank settlements as legal (nor are they so recognised by international law), American foreign aid and security assistance has been essential to these policies. Here again religiosity is hardly a dominant factor.

 

Jewish spokespersons in America have been mainstream Jews, decidedly moderate and liberal, and in the main, political Democrats. Those that are religious are, again, moral in tone and liberal in sensibility. It is important to note that the main public figures that have garnered support for Israel in the United States have framed Jewish and non-Jewish support for Israel in Holocaust sensibility and moral language. Few frame their support in anything resembling Orthodox, right-wing nationalist or settler language.

 

The major spokesperson for Holocaust/Israel consciousness in the United States is Elie Wiesel. Over the years, Wiesel has been powerful both within the Jewish community and outside it, having to his credit the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US Congressional Gold Medal, the Nobel Peace Prize, and a major role in the development of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is a friend of presidents as different as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, appears often on national television as a commentator on moral and ethical issues, and is seen at prestigious national events like the State of the Union address. Wiesel is religious in a particularly Jewish and liberal ecumenical way that has a broad appeal for Jews who want to claim a post-Holocaust Jewish identity and non-Jews who want to repent of the sin of anti-Semitism that European Christianity promulgated with such fervour over much of its history.

 

In Wiesel’s written works and public presentations there is no mention of biblical claims to the land of Judea and Samaria, or even to the land that constitutes pre-1967 Israel; nor is there discussion of settlements and settlers or religious shrines and attachments. Jerusalem is spoken about in an abstract, mystical way, as is the 1967 war, in which for Wiesel Israeli soldiers carried Jewish history and innocence into a battle they did not want.

 

Shorn of the details of occupation and settlement, Israel in Wiesel’s narrative becomes a homeland for persecuted European Jews and Holocaust survivors. Jews are innocent in suffering and empowerment. Israel is a moral crusade that all of humanity is called upon to affirm and support. For Wiesel, there are no politics or army or Palestinians. America supports this endeavour because, like Israel, Americans are innocent and good. Even Christians, now reformed of their anti-Semitism, practise their essential innocence and goodness by supporting Israel as a response to the Holocaust they, or at least their tradition, helped to unleash.

 

In many ways, support for Israel is a support without maps or politics. In a public and national way, there has never been in the United States a sustained and rational discussion about Israel. This is true within the Jewish community as well. The arguments about Israel that include Palestinians are between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian supporters, or at least this is how the debate is defined. The reality of the expanded state of Israel, a state that now extends its reach between Tel Aviv and the Jordan River—with over three million Palestinians in between—is unknown to most Americans and Jews in the United States as well.

Settler Judaism

It is within the liberal Jewish narrative in Israel and the United States that Jewish fundamentalism comes into play. And it is here that Christian and Islamic fundamentalism flourish as well. While not the sole reason for either Christian or Islamic fundamentalism, Israel, especially in its expanded form, plays a major symbolic and material role for all three fundamentalisms as we enter the twenty-first century.

 

Shortly after the conclusion of the 1967 war, Jewish fundamentalism, already on the sidelines, prepared for a major role in the future of Israel. If the Holocaust was the nadir of Jewish history wasn’t the capture of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria the beginning of redemption? Jewish zealots took the celebratory mood felt by Jews around the world after the 1967 victory and conquest of Jerusalem as a sign from God that redemption was near. Although clothing their beliefs in religious rhetoric, the new Jewish settlers saw these opportunities as a breakthrough in the creation of Israel rather than a break with Israeli history. After all, the creation of Israel was through a process of settlement.

 

The expansion of Israel in the 1967 war was a continuation of that process. Those Jews who wanted no part of settlements in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas saw the victory of Israel in the war as necessary and a negotiated solution that would return the territories as imminent. Here the religiously motivated worked within the system of Israeli politics to place their new settlement ideas in the context of Jewish history and an evolving history of the Israeli state.

 

Appeal could be made on a variety of levels without involving diverse constituencies in overt religious ideology. Ordinary Israelis could find in the settlements greater economic and housing possibilities and secular nationalists could use the religious fervour of the settlers to accomplish their goal of an expanded state. As has often been the case in Israeli history, security concerns that Israel was too small to defend itself were used to argue for expansion. The Old City of Jerusalem was, for most Israelis, non-negotiable from the moment Israeli forces entered the ancient walls. Could such a symbol of Jewish history ever be returned?

 

The forces of religious zeal were thus unleashed within a broader spectrum of war, occupation and state policies of consolidation and expansion. Thus, to see the subsequent decades of Israeli history only or even primarily within the context of Jewish fundamentalism is to miss the larger story. To understand the combination of politics, ideology and religion that intersect in the expanded state of Israel we need a broader concept than Jewish fundamentalism. Instead, I suggest “Settler Judaism” as this concept because it encompasses the diverse aspects of Israeli and American Jewish life that have led to the present impasse. Settler Judaism brings together the radical right, religious fundamentalism and liberal politics in a coherent if unexpected framework of overt and covert sensibilities that increasingly define Israeli and American Jewry.

 

To understand Settler Judaism we begin with four points of analysis: (1) the settlements themselves, who formed them and who lives within them; (2) Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” to the Palestinians at the Camp David talks in July 2000 as a way of demonstrating the continuing involvement of the Israeli government in the settlement process; (3) Sharon’s proposal for the final settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian question; (4) the campaign by major Jewish organisations to silence dissent regarding these policies during the current Palestinian uprising.

 

Instead of delving into the history of Settler Judaism, I will concentrate on the period following the September 1993 Oslo agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. As we shall see, Settler Judaism is alive and well today, perhaps even stronger than ever. As is true historically, its strength is diverse, with politics, policies and narrative at the centre. As is also true historically, it is the combination of Jews in Israel and America with American foreign policy that allows Settler Judaism to flourish in the twenty-first century.

1. Settlement Activity

With respect to the Jewish settlements, the West Bank is divided into three parts or three long strips of land.

 

The first strip of settlements was established in the Jordan Valley. It consists of fifteen settlements which were set up after the 1967 war and just before the war of October 1973. These settlements were developed by traditional Labour-Zionist settlement institutions—the Kibbutz and Moshav movements.

 

The second strip, further west in the Jordan Valley, was pioneered by the religious settler movement, Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful). These settlements were a form of resistance to the 1967 Allon Plan, which advocated Israeli annexation of a substantial part of the West Bank but sought to avoid settlements near Palestinian population centres. For Gush Emunim, not settling near these centres meant conceding these areas in any future agreements. Interestingly, these religious settlements had many and diverse allies: those identified with the political right—Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Sharon—but also those identified with liberal politics—Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan. Conservative and liberal politicians alike wanted to destroy the Allon Plan and share joint control over the entire West Bank with Jordan.

 

Most settlers live in the third strip, closest to the pre-1967 border of Israel. Three types of settlers can be identified here: those seeking a better quality of life, the economically needy and those who are both economically needy and ultra-Orthodox.

 

Most alarming to Palestinians is the expansion of the settler presence since the Oslo agreements. Indeed, since 1993, Israeli statistics indicate an annual increase of about 8 per cent in the settler population, which rose from 116,000 in the West Bank and Gaza to over 200,000 at the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000. If the number of Jews living in areas of Jerusalem annexed after the 1967 war is added, then the settler population increases by another 210,000 Jewish Israelis.

2. Barak’s Offer

Barak’s “generous offer” has been more often asserted than analysed. It is instructive to see Barak’s offer as falling within a continuity of Israeli policy since 1967. Middle East expert Sara Roy of Harvard University offers the following analysis, which merits being quoted at length:

 

By the time of the Camp David Summit in July 2000, there were several processes taking place simultaneously and superimposed on each other: (1) the steady confiscation of Arab lands in the West Bank and Gaza; (2) the accelerated expansion of existing Israeli settlements and the construction of new settlements on confiscated lands, bisecting them; (3) the near doubling of the settler population to 200,000 in ten years, a population that is hostile, armed, and empowered, with total freedom of movement and all the privileges of Israeli citizenship; (4) the division of the West Bank and Gaza Strip into cantons or enclaves disconnected from each other by territories under the control of Israel, which directly results from the terms of the Oslo agreements; (5) the paving of 250 miles of bypass roads onto confiscated lands that run north–south and east–west creating a grid that further bisects and encircles Palestinian areas, producing the 227 enclaves referred to by Amnesty International; (6) the institutionalization of closure policy, which limits, restricts, and at times totally prohibits the movement of Arab people and goods, locking them into the enclave structure created by the Oslo accords, and wreaking havoc with their economy; and (7) the construction of hundreds of checkpoints and barricades throughout the West Bank designed to control and further restrict the movement of Palestinians.¹

 

Roy adds that Barak’s budget for the year 2000 “allocated $6.5 million for the construction of bypass roads, $30 million for settlement expansion, and $51 million for the confiscation of Palestinian lands”.

3. Sharon’s Map

Rather than departing in a fundamental way from Barak’s sensibility, Sharon continues it. Sharon’s understanding of a solution between Israel and the Palestinians conforms to his earlier goals and the consensus of previous Israeli administrations. In fact, Sharon seeks to implement as a final settlement with the Palestinians the map of an expanded Israel that he, with others, helped to create.

 

That map is intriguing. According to the New York Times, Sharon wants to retain West Bank land in two security zones. These zones would comprise two north to south strips that would “bracket Palestinian areas like the sides of a ladder”. The western zone, whose width would be three to six miles, would parallel that edge of the West Bank, the same area where Sharon oversaw the building of settlements more than twenty years ago. The second zone would run through the rift valley just west of the Jordan River. This second zone, facing Jordan and beyond it Iraq, would be nine to twelve miles wide. Between the security zones would run Israeli roads that the Times article refers to as the “rungs of the ladder”. According to the Times, the effect of the completed ladder would be the following: “This Israeli security system would not only consume swaths of land [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat expects to govern, it would also wall off separate areas of the Palestinian state.”²

4. American Jewry

The American Jewish establishment, with minor exceptions, seeks to protect Israel from the negative images resulting from Palestinian resistance to the occupation and the Israeli repression of that resistance. Since the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, American Jewish groups have paid for full-page statements in major newspapers around the United States. These statements urge Jewish unity and unqualified support for the state of Israel.

 

At a pro-Israel rally in October 2000, more than a month into the al-Aqsa intifada, Elie Wiesel addressed his remarks to President Clinton. Stating that Jews stood by Israel in the present crisis “imposed on her” by the “intransigence” of Arafat, Wiesel identified himself as one who rejects “hatred and fanaticism”. For Wiesel, those who consider peace as the “noblest of efforts” have no choice but to recognise finally that Arafat is “ignorant, devious and unworthy of trust”. After all, Arafat has rejected the “unprecedented generous territorial concessions” offered by Barak.

 

What is interesting in Wiesel’s remarks is what he omits. Nowhere is the map of Israel/Palestine referred to. In Wiesel’s narrative, settlements do not exist, nor do bypass roads or security zones. Wiesel’s narrative does include mention of the Jewish attachment to Jerusalem, but again in a way that mystifies it rather than explains its politicised nature. “Under Israel’s sovereignty, Christians, Jews and Muslims alike could pray without fear in Jerusalem,” Wiesel asserts. Jerusalem is “our capital”, the centre of Jewish history. Wiesel continues: “A Jew may be far from Jerusalem, but not without Jerusalem. Though a Jew may not live in Jerusalem, Jerusalem lives inside of him.”³

 

No mention is made of either the attempt to force Palestinians to leave Jerusalem or the overall policies of remaking Jerusalem, especially the Old City, in Jewish and Israeli ways. The strong and equally claimed attachment of Palestinians and Islam to Jerusalem is ignored. The possibility of Israel and Palestine claiming Jerusalem as a joint capital—a possibility envisioned by Palestinians and more than a few Jews inside and outside Israel—is similarly unmentioned.

 

Even the claim of worship without fear in Jerusalem is dubious. Since the signing of the Oslo agreements, entry into the city for Palestinians outside Jerusalem has largely been restricted. The possibility of prayer in the al-Aqsa mosque has been obstructed by the same map and occupation that Wiesel fails to mention.

 

After the 11 September terrorist attacks, Wiesel wrote a short article for Jewish Week. Like many Jews, he offered condolences to those killed and thanks to those who attempted to rescue the victims. The lessons Wiesel draws from this tragedy are lessons for all Americans. “As Americans were counting their dead and trying to cope with the immense tragedy that struck our cities, in their camps Palestinians were jubilant. They fired rifles in the air, proudly shouting their happiness.” Wiesel ends his article with the question, “Does the world now understand better what Israelis feel when their parents and children are murdered by suicide bombers?”⁴

 

Here again it is interesting what is written and what is left unsaid. The “jubilation” of Palestinians has been disputed in the world press and by Palestinians themselves. At the same time, the fact that the helicopter gunships and fighter aircraft that have attacked Palestinian territory are made in America is unmentioned. That the “enemies of America” may in fact have legitimate grievances vis-à-vis US foreign policy seems impossible in Wiesel’s rhetoric.

 

Are the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center so easily equated with Palestinian suicide bombers? Could Palestinian suicide bombers be, at least for a population under occupation and closure and without an armed force that is in any way comparable to the Israeli military, the equivalent to Israel’s helicopter gunships? If it is morally right to condemn terrorism of the weak, does Wiesel have the moral obligation to condemn other forms of terrorism, including terrorism carried out by the nation-state?

Constantinianism

Settler Judaism is a militarised Judaism. A militarised Judaism is a militarised Jewish world on the religious, political and narrative levels. The genius of the Israeli narrative both in Israel and America is to articulate historical weakness as contemporary, innocence in historical suffering as being maintained during empowerment, and political resistance to Israel’s occupation as mirroring those who sought to destroy Jews and Jewish life when Jews were stateless. A militarised Judaism and Jewish life is a Constantinian Judaism, in which Jewish energies, creativity, wealth and political power in Israel and America are placed in service of the state. Again, the term “fundamentalism” hardly suffices here. The forces joined are a militant orthodoxy, political power shared by liberals and conservatives, and a liberal narrative that appeals on moral and ethical levels but omits the details and maps that contradict that narrative.

 

Constantinian Judaism was, of course, pioneered by Constantinian Christianity. From the fourth century onwards, Christianity moved from being a marginal religious movement to a state-empowered religion. During those years, Christianity was given free reign within the Roman Empire, at least as regards promulgating its religious vision. But Christianity was also forced to bless the state in war and peace. In the process, Christianity, especially as it accompanied colonial and imperial power, became a global religion. It also became a specialist in justifying violence and too often blessed atrocity. At the same time, a militarised Christianity persecuted other forms of Christianity that resisted imperial state power and the political empowerment of the church. Jews were also persecuted and demeaned and the long tortuous road to Auschwitz was begun.

 

Constantinian Judaism is relatively new and small in comparison to the Constantinian Christianity shunned by many Christians today. Here, certain forms of Judaism and Jewish life are deemed “authentic”, namely, those that uncritically identify with America and Israel. Jews who resist serving the state and power are deemed “inauthentic” and are persecuted by elements of the Jewish establishment. Those who question Constantinian Judaism are accused of weakness, of refusing to stand up as Jews, of assimilating to the broader non-Jewish world. But those who resist this militarised form of Judaism and Jewish life see another assimilation of the establishment: to the state and power. Is Constantinian Islam, and the diverse world of assertion of power and resistance to it found in contemporary Islam, any different from Constantinian Christianity and Constantinian Judaism?

 

The understanding of Jewish, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism as being essentially the same must be re-evaluated. Militarised religion in its actions and life in the world is the same on many levels, but it is vital to understand the place of each religion in its community, society and nation at any one particular time, and the relation between communities, societies and nations in terms of status and power. Judaism and Christianity in an empowered United States need to be understood differently from Islam in a disempowered Middle East. While the tendencies toward Constantinianism may be similar in their stridency, the situation makes all the difference. So, too, with resistance to Constantinianism in each religion. The context is crucial, both in relation to the expression of resistance and the possibility of conscience becoming active and articulate.

 

Surely, a militarised politics leads to a militarised religiosity. Historically they go hand in hand. But just as surely, a demilitarised political situation allows for a demilitarised religiosity. The point here is to move beyond blame and begin—with maps, politics, religion and narrative—to change the dynamic of situations that lead to oppression and death.

Jerusalem

Where better to begin than in Jerusalem? If Jerusalem is spoken about in abstract terms, as the centre of Judaism or Islam or the eternal or only capital of Jews or Palestinians, then a political and religious mobilisation for Jerusalem is imperative. This is true for the victors, in this case Israel, and the defeated, in this case Palestinians. But it would also be true if the victors and defeated traded places. Moreover, the claim of victory and defeat in a city and region where Jews and Palestinians are almost equal in population is an illusion. The mobilisation has to be kept in place. A perpetual occupation has to be actualised and justified.

 

But if Jerusalem is seen as the geographical, political, cultural and religious middle of Israel and Palestine, if Jerusalem is seen as broken by a history of violence and a cycle of possession and dispossession, then a new claim can be made on Jerusalem in which sovereignty is shared and real, with politics, culture, religion and population brought together to live together.

 

Religion is also called upon to play its role. Here, militarisation is foregone and the Constantinianism of each religion is jettisoned. Rather, the side of each religion that embraces harmony, peace, justice and inclusion is emphasised. Fundamentalism begins to lose its power and importance, and the militarisation of religious values loses its audience.

 

Recognising that Jerusalem is the broken middle of Israel/Palestine means that the map of Israel/Palestine as it is today, with Israel stretching from Tel Aviv to the Jordan River and having two remnant Palestinian populations under its control, must be confronted. It also means a commitment among Jewish Israelis and Jews around the world to change that map to one of equality, either through a withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders of Israel and a sharing of Jerusalem as a joint capital with the new state of Palestine, or through a commitment to a binational state with full citizenship for Jews and Palestinians without regard to ethnic or religious affiliation. This, coupled with the confession of historic wrongs done to the Palestinian people, can move the Middle East crisis from injustice and atrocity to justice, healing and hope.

 

Identity here is crucial. In the cycle of violence and atrocity, identity becomes as important as religious affirmation. It is crucial to the victors, who symbolically and materially triumph, and to the defeated, who have lost all other power. It is here that fundamentalist religious ideas gain purchase, to mobilise the victors and to protect the defeated from ultimate demoralisation. Identity is frozen, seen as ancient, but is actually quite modern. All identity is simultaneously linked to the past and thoroughly contemporary.

 

Identities are always evolving. The only question is in what direction. Fundamentalism is primarily an attempt to freeze identity. However, like the pretence to innocence, it serves only as a cover to disguise constant change. Settler and Constantinian Judaism and Islamic fundamentalism are thoroughly modern in their use of modern technology, state power, and even the weapons of terror.

 

In the end, the struggle is to seek a depth of identity in the context of the times in which we live. As with the affirmation of the broken middle of Jerusalem and the demilitarisation of religion, identity formation is a choice and struggle within and among the communities we come from and inhabit. The context itself plays a significant role. For Jews and Palestinians, identity formation in the broken middle of Jerusalem will look quite different from what it does today within the cycle of victory and defeat in a “unified” Jerusalem that masks injustice.

Past Weakness, Present Power

Judaism and Jewish life exist within the dynamic of a history that is both ancient and contemporary, a diaspora sensibility that is now empowered within Israel and America. Hence the currents and crosscurrents found within Jewish life: intense religiosity and extreme secularity, a moderate and right-wing nationalism, a Jewish identity revolving around the Holocaust and Israel, a claim to innocence in both suffering and empowerment. Like most ideologists, philosophers and theologians, Jewish commentators articulate Jewish history and its future without precise maps, especially when those maps contradict deeply held emotions and sensibilities. Or the maps referred to are partial, drawn to suit community needs and aspirations.

 

The map of the Holocaust is, of course, widely held and discussed in the Jewish world, but this map becomes distorted when the other map of contemporary Jewish life, the map of Israel/Palestine, is unannounced. More often, the map of the Holocaust and Jewish suffering in Europe is applied to an abstracted map of Israel/Palestine as if the Holocaust was just ending, as if the trains to Auschwitz were still waiting, as if Israel was still in formation.

 

Ariel Sharon’s statement in the post–11 September period exemplifies this attitude. Accusing the United States of trying to “appease the Arabs at our expense”—that is, of neglecting what Israel considers to be Palestinian terrorism in order to form a worldwide coalition that includes Arab and Muslim governments—Sharon recalled the policy of appeasement that led to the Munich Pact of 1938 and the dismantling of Czechoslovakia.⁵

 

The invocation of the Holocaust world at a time of unprecedented Jewish empowerment both in Israel and America is the framework through which Jewish movements must be analysed. This is true of Jewish discourse in America and Israel, whether religious or secular. Whatever the terminology adopted—Settler Judaism, Constantinian Judaism or Jewish fundamentalism—the context remains that of a post-Holocaust Judaism and Jewish life grappling with a new-found power, yet simultaneously existing in a time warp that is occasionally self-serving, often operating on a raw and subconscious terrain. One moment Jews proceed in a sophisticated, thoroughly modern way within the international nation-state system; the next moment in a pre-modern particularity with an anger and sense of Jewish destiny that transcend the nation-state system and the responsibilities of a nuclear power. Israel’s sense of itself is that of a nation-state and a ghetto, abiding by some international agreements and totally disregarding others for reasons of national security and Jewish destiny.

 

Only with the map of the Holocaust, with the understanding of our place in the world then, and without the map of Israel/Palestine as it exists today, with the understanding of our place in the world today, are Judaism and Jewish life a force that can be dangerous to Jews and others. Unfortunately, those Jews who identify this second map are often branded as misguided and dangerous. They may even be labelled as traitors. Non-Jews who identify the map of Israel/Palestine are labelled as well, as “innocents”, as “Arab-lovers”, as “anti-Semites”. There is a personal and professional cost to speaking of what Jews are doing in the world in relation to the map of Israel/Palestine. Politically, the cost is high. Once one is labelled as a “self-hating Jew” or an “anti-Semite”, one’s character is undermined and distorted. Thus, the fear of public speech in relation to Israel and on behalf of the Palestinians is high.

 

Here we enter the terrain of ecumenical dialogue, a dialogue between Judaism and Christianity in the West, but now expanded to America’s political culture, in which limits are placed on the discussion of Jews and Israel. In this dialogue, Jews and others are forced into a historical discussion of anti-Semitism as if it remained the defining aspect of Jewish life in the present. Although a nation-state, Israel cannot be considered only in such terms. Jews are one of the most empowered groups in America, but discussions of that empowerment are often censored.

Choices Facing Jews

In the post–11 September period, Muslims are being invited into this ecumenical deal, but again their grievances towards Christians and Jews, including the state of Israel, have to be buried as the ticket of admission. Hence the concentration on fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian and Islamic—with those not invited to the table of ecumenical relations singled out as the culprits in a myriad of events and problems. That Sharon—and before him Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak, to name only Israel’s post-Oslo prime ministers—were not fundamentalists or even religious, that they and their predecessors all helped to establish the state of Israel, indeed helped to create the Israeli consensus that thought through and established the map of Israel as it exists today, is almost never alluded to.

 

Representing the fundamentalist option as the problem takes the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to be solvable if only the extremists and extremism could be eliminated. But Arafat has been known for years, especially by Israel, to be a moderate; and if the Israeli leadership truly desires peace and a two-state solution, why is it that every Israeli government from the 1967 war onwards has made such a solution less and less possible? The repeated calls for settlement freezes have come and gone over the years as the boundaries of Israel have expanded. Each boundary advance becomes a “fact” that cannot be rolled back and the mere suggestion of such a rollback is defined as extremism.

 

Within this context, Barak’s offer is “generous”: his plan does not take any more land than Israel has already taken and grants some symbolic sovereignty in Jerusalem where once real sovereignty was demanded but is no longer even seen as thinkable. The failure of Camp David is portrayed politically as Arafat’s rejection of the generous offer, but it was Barak who lost the election a few months later as someone who voters felt had offered the Palestinians too much. Indeed, a vernacular reading of Sharon’s electoral platform was that Barak had offered up the Jewish state to a terrorist. Now Netanyahu is positioning himself to the right of Sharon for the next campaign. His charge: Sharon is ready to compromise the greater land of Israel.

 

The politicised ecumenical deal does little to encourage Israel or Jews in America to deal honestly with the questions before us. Without honesty, there is left only a bullying that I encountered in Christchurch. Yossi Olmert does not represent the majority of Jews in Israel or in America, but he does represent a political climate backed by state power in Israel and the silence of American Jewish leadership.

 

US foreign policy is culpable as well. Regardless of the official positions, America has been the great enabler, without which the expanded state of Israel could not exist in its present configuration. American foreign policy often cloaks itself in innocence, and in the case of Israel, America’s “friendship” is explained in a different way from that of our friendship with any other nation. In fact, explanations are mostly dispensed with, US support for Israel simply being taken for granted.

 

In the post–11 September period, a critical review of American foreign policy is in order. The current mood in America is one that divides the forces of light and darkness, the civilised and uncivilised. But the case of Israel and the Palestinians demonstrates that such divisions are too neat. The world outside our borders is more complicated, as is the world inside our borders.

 

It is in Israel’s interest that we be vigilant and honest in our appraisal both as Jews and as Americans. Is it possible that a solidarity with Israel also demands a solidarity with the Palestinians, knowing that one community will never be secure if the other is not?

 

A dual solidarity cannot be symmetrical at the outset, as Israel’s dominance must be reversed in order to create some kind of parity between the parties. At this juncture, “even-handedness” is less solidarity than convenience, avoiding the hard questions and policies needed to redress the imbalance that spawns helicopter gunships and suicide bombers.

 

After the Holocaust and Israel, the choices before us as Jews are clear. The decisions are being made in the more sophisticated corridors of Jewish power and influence rather than by the bellicose religious minority labelled Jewish fundamentalists. The problem is less one of religious extremism than of a moderation that is planned and expansive, backed by the power of Israel and America and framed in a liberal narrative that few, at least in the West, can argue with.

 

In this context, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, what does it mean to be faithful as a Jew? Arguing for the broken middle of Jerusalem is to argue against the bully in Christchurch as the future of the Jewish people. It is to say, within the complexities of Jewish and world history, that the pursuit of justice is at the centre of Jewish life and that this pursuit becomes more challenging when a people is in power than when it is the victim of power.

 

The world is often presented as a place where the cycle of power rules. In order to stay on top one must ensure that those over whom you have power never have the power to reverse the situation. The result is the militarisation of politics, culture and religion on both sides until a war of attrition becomes the norm.

 

It is difficult to argue against the reality of this cycle in simple historical terms. The oppressed, when given the chance, oppress others. Of course, the language of power is rarely used by the victorious. Rather, past grievances and victimisation and political and religious claims to righteousness and innocence become the order of the day.

 

Can we claim to be Jewish if this cycle of power is affirmed as the last word, if we assert that an interdependent empowerment is impossible? We have reached this place of decision. The fundamental questions facing the future of Jewish life are before us. But the issue is not a Judaism or an Israeli state hijacked by Jewish fundamentalists. Nor is it a fight against Islamic fundamentalists. Rather, it is a struggle for the heart and soul of the long history of the Jewish people. 

Endnotes

1. Sara Roy, “The Palestinian–Israeli Crisis: An Analysis” (paper presented at “The United States in the Middle East: Politics, Religion and Violence”, a symposium sponsored by the Center for International Studies at the University of Delaware, 21 February 2025).

 

2. James Bennet, “Hopes Are Modest as Israelis and Palestinians Await the Bush Plan”, New York Times, 12 October 2001.

 

3. Elie Wiesel, speech at New York Israel Solidarity Rally, 12 October 2024 [www.aish.com/jewishissues/israeldiary/Elie_Wiesel_Speaks_Out.asp].

 

4. Elie Wiesel, “A Common Enemy”, Jewish Week, 14 September 2001.

 

5. James Bennet, “Sharon Invokes Munich in Warning US on ‘Appeasement’ ”, New York Times, 5 October 2001.