Israel’s Aggressive Promotion of Aliyah a Rejection of Jewish Life Outside Israel

By Allan C. Brownfeld

In July, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel issued an appeal for all Jews in France to move to Israel “immediately” in response to a sharp rise in anti-Semitic attacks.

“Move to Israel as early as possible. That’s what I say to Jews all around the world, but there [in France], I think it’s a must,” Sharon told an American Jewish group meeting in Jerusalem.

His appeal came after the disclosure that in the first six months of the year, France’s Interior Ministry recorded l35 acts and 375 threats of anti-Semitic attacks, compared with l25 acts and 463 threats in all of last year.

A French Foreign Ministry spokesman in Paris called Sharon’s remarks “unacceptable.” He said: “We immediately made contact with the Israeli authorities for an explanation of these unacceptable comments.”

The front-page headline of the center-right newspaper Le Figaro termed it “Sharon’s insult to France.” A front-page editorial in the newspaper France-Soir declared that the Israeli leader is “losing his marbles.”

Reported the July 20 New York Times: “French politicians rushed to the airwaves to condemn his declaration. Mr. Sharon ‘missed a good opportunity to keep quiet,’ Jean-Louis Debre, the president of the National Assembly, told Europe 1 Radio. ‘These words are inadmissible, unacceptable and, furthermore, irresponsible.’ French Jewish leaders also voiced strong disapproval. ‘He doesn’t have the right to decide for us,’ said Theo Klein, honorary president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, or CRIF, an umbrella group, on France 2 television. An editorial in the daily Le Monde suggested that Mr. Sharon’s declaration about French Jews was motivated by a desire to ‘discredit’ France and keep Europe out of any resolution of the Middle East crisis.”

French officials defended their policies to eradicate anti-Semitism and other forms of racism. “Certainly France today is the country with the strictest legislation dealing with all problems of racism,” stated Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie.

French President Jacques Chirac, in an address early in July, called upon French citizens to be vigilant and to mobilize against intolerance.

On July 28, the Israeli prime minister praised France for its “determined action” against anti-Semitism in what The Washington Post on July 29 called “an apparent attempt to smooth over a diplomatic spat that began July l8 when he said France was the home of ‘the wildest anti-Semitism.’”

According to Sharon, “We...very much appreciate the determined action of the French government, as well as the French president’s stance against anti-Semitism. We hope that this determination will serve as an example to other countries as well.”

Particular developments in France have little to do with Sharon’s calls for emigration.

Noted the July 24 issue of The Economist: “The annoying thing for French politicians was that Mr. Sharon’s remarks coincided with a historically resonant public ceremony at which top public figures made a frank acknowledgement of the evils of anti-Semitism under the wartime Vichy regime. What the ceremony commemorated was the Velodrome d’Hiver roundup in July l942, when 8,000 French Jews were arrested over two days and detained at a sports stadium in Drancy. Only in l995 did France officially accept that its own nationals had carried out the roundup. This year, six government ministers...took part in the memorial ceremony, and they used it to make solemn warnings about the resurgence of anti-Semitic activity...”

The fact is, however, that particular developments in France have little to do with Sharon’s calls for emigration. He has repeatedly expressed the view that Israel “is the only place on Earth where Jews can live as Jews.” At the present time, the government of Israel is launching a worldwide campaign to increase Jewish immigration to Israel. Some Jewish leaders, such as Lina Filiba, vice president of the Turkish Jewish community, charge that the Israeli government has exploited anti-Semitic acts such as synagogue bombings in Istanbul, in pursuit of its immigration policy.

No one, of course, should be surprised by any of this. For many years, the State of Israel and the adherents of Zionism in other countries have maintained the position that Israel is the “Jewish homeland,” and that Jews outside of Israel are in “exile,” and that a “full Jewish life” can be lived only in the Jewish state. In our own country, even the leaders of Reform Judaism recently adopted a statement of principles holding that Israel is “central” to Jewish life and encouraging aliyah, emigration to Israel.

On a January 1996 visit to Germany, Israeli President Ezer Weizman declared that he “cannot understand how 40,000 Jews can live in Germany,” and asserted that, “The place of Jews is in Israel. Only in Israel can Jews live full Jewish lives.”

Ignatz Bubis, the head of Germany’s main Jewish organization, stated: “I have lived here since l945 and have met two new generations who simply do not identify with the Nazis. This is a new generation.”

Arguing that a Jewish presence in Germany prevents Hitler from achieving his posthumous victory of a “Judenrein” Germany, he declared: “The full revival of the Jewish community in post-war Germany is important.” Weizman was not singling out German Jews with his comments, Bubis acknowledged: “He says the same thing to American Jews and Belgian Jews and in all other countries.”

American Jews Beg to Differ

Weizman’s declaration that all Jews should live in Israel was widely criticized in the U.S.

Shoshana Cardin, chairman of the United Israel Appeal, said, “I think it is demeaning to our role in promoting Jewish culture and Jewish life. Israel might be central to Jewish life, but it cannot ignore the Jewish center which exists in the U.S.”

Professor Deborah Lipstadt, who teaches Holocaust and modern Jewish studies at Emory University, argued that Weizman’s remarks reflect an inability of Zionists to come to grips with the reality that Jews can thrive as Jews everywhere in the world.

She sees that reality in the faces of her Jewish students at the university, Dr. Lipstadt said. These students pursue all the opportunities America has to offer and don’t “fit the old Zionist stereotype of the craven Galut Jew, frightened and hesitant about their Judaism. I think [the Zionist theorists] certainly didn’t expect that America would give them the opportunity it has given Jews.”

The Zionist ideology which dominates Israeli thinking persists, however. Inherent in this philosophy is the notion that Jews outside of Israel are, somehow, in “exile” and that the Judaism they practice is less than legitimate.

In l998, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called upon American Jews to make a “mass aliyah” to Israel. The head of the Jewish Agency, Avram Burg, declared that the synagogue in Western countries is the “symbol of destruction,” and that the new center of Jewish life should be the state of Israel.

In 2000, Israeli President Moshe Katsev called upon Jews around the world to make aliyah and argued against “legitimizing” Jewish life in other countries. In a book published in 2000, Conversations With Yitzhak Shamir, the former Israeli prime minister declared: “The very essence of our being obliges every Jew to live in Eretz Yisrael...In my opinion, a man has no right to consider himself a part of the Jewish people without also being a Zionist, because Zionism states that in order for a Jew to live as a Jew he needs to have his own country, his own life, and his own future.”

Writing in Forum, a publication of the World Zionist Organization, Ephraim Urbach declared that “Zionism’s task in the coming years is to transform the State of Israel from the center of interest for Jews to the land wherein they dwell and take root.”

Visiting Washington, DC on a trip to promote immigration to Israel, Ya’akov Kirschen, a New York native who himself emigrated, told students at George Washington University: “You’re not Americans—you’re Jews in the last stage of throwing off your identity. Going to Israel, you won’t be tearing up your roots because this isn’t where your roots are. You’ll be coming home.”

In his much-discussed book, Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic, Hillel Halkin wrote, “Diaspora Jewry...is doomed. Jewish life has a future, if at all, only in Israel.” Insisting that the diaspora is “historically played out,” Halkin, who had himself emigrated from America to Israel in l970, concluded that to properly live as a Jew one had but one choice, “coming from the Diaspora to here.”

More and more American Jews have challenged the Zionist notion that a Jewish life can only be lived in Israel and that they are in “exile” in their own country.

In his recently published book, American Judaism, Professor Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University noted that “American Jews mostly rejected Halkin’s call to migrate. For them, the prime justification for Israel’s existence was not the declining state of the Jewish diaspora but the memory of the Holocaust. The destruction of 6 million Jews, followed by the ‘miraculous’ creation of the Jewish state, constituted for them, a modern-day re-enactment of an ancient tale of death and rebirth.”

Even American Jews who call themselves Zionists reject the notion that all Jews should emigrate to Israel and that a “full” Jewish life can only be lived there. Writing in Midstream, Prof. Melvin Urofsky of Virginia Commonwealth University pointed out that, “The Zionism we have in the United States today is the legacy of the Brandeis era in that it is widespread, does not contemplate aliyah as a central tenet and supports the Jewish community of the Holy Land. It is more philanthropic than ideological...”

Compared to the Zionist movements of Europe, he argued, American Zionism “differed in significant ways...American Jews did not face rampant anti-Semitism, which explains why certain types of Zionism did not flourish in this country...Immigrants learned...as Louis D. Brandeis preached at them...that they could be both good Americans and good Jews by being good Zionists. The Brandeisian form of Zionism, with its emphasis on American values, succeeded brilliantly.”

When Israel was first established, many prominent American Jews were concerned about the Zionist leaders’ contempt for Jewish life outside of Israel and their desire for a massive emigration of all Jews to the new state. In particular, they did not want Israel to interfere in the “internal affairs” of the American Jewish community.

Allaying U.S. Fears

An historic exchange in l950 between the president of the American Jewish Committee, Jacob Blaustein, and Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, sought to allay these fears. As summarized by the committee, the agreement stipulated that: “(l) Jews of the United States, as a community and as individuals, have only one political attachment, namely to the United States of America; (2) that the Government and people of Israel respect the integrity of Jewish life in the democratic countries and the right of Jewish communities to develop their indigenous social, economic and cultural aspirations, in accordance with their own needs and institutions; and (3) that Israel fully accepts the fact that the Jews of the Uniited States do not live ‘in exile,’ and that America is home for them.”

Whatever David Ben-Gurion may have said in l950, the fact is that ever since the State of Israel has persisted in promoting the idea that Jews living outside of its borders are indeed in “exile” and that all Jews should emigrate to the Jewish state. This call for emigration has little to do with anti-Semitic incidents in countries such as France, for these calls are as vocal in countries such as the United States as they are in France.

A mass emigration effort is now under way and has been organized and partly financed by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a group which plans to move more than l,500 Jews to Israel this year, substantially boosting North American immigration. The group’s goal is to bring l00,000 Jews to Israel within the next five to ten years. Private donors have enabled Nefesh B’Nefesh to provide grants of up to $25,000 for each new immigrant. The Israeli government has thrown its full support behind these efforts. They do not hesitate to make clear that with the Jewish birthrate much lower than those of their Palestinian and Arab neighbors, they fear that without increased immigration, Jews will become a minority within their own territory and that Israel will either cease to be democratic or lose its Jewish character.

“Nefesh B’Nefesh represents making one of the dreams I fought for a reality,” states Israeli Finance Minister Netanyahu, who rarely misses an opportunity to tell American Jews that they should emigrate to Israel, “bringing home to Zion our Jewish brethren from the diaspora.”

American Jewish organizations have been hesitant to criticize Israeli government programs which promote the idea that all Jews belong in Israel and that the United States, however comfortable, remains a place of “exile.” This concept, repugnant to the vast majority of Americans of Jewish faith, who clearly view themselves as American by nationality, citizenship and political allegiance, and Jews by religion, should be publicly repudiated by the organized Jewish community.

Fortunately, there seems to be some movement in this direction. In the present post-Zionist era, the term “diaspora” is going out of style as a way to refer to Jews outside of Israel. Even the venerable Museum of the Diaspora in Israel is now referring to itself at times as the Museum of the Jewish People.

According to The Forward, “As post-Zionist ideology gains speed, as Jewish communities around the world gain confidence in their legitimacy and as Reform and Conservative Jews grow disillusioned with their movements’ status (in Israel), ‘Diaspora’ is being relegated to the realm of the politically incorrect. The shift in terminology is significant, because it signals that the way Jews around the world think about Israel is changing, with the Jewish state’s centrality on the wane and criticism of its history on the rise...The idea, say detractors of the term, implies that Jewish life outside Israel is somehow inferior to Jewish life in Israel—a concept that some may find distasteful but that others uphold as a pillar of Zionism.”

The fact is that Judaism is a religion of universal values—and a worthy Jewish life can be lived anyplace in the world, as has been the case through thousands of years of history.

All of this, of course, has genuine implications for the future of Middle East peace. If Israel is the state of all of the Jews of the world, it is unlikely to withdraw from the occupied territories, for it would need space to house its “exiled” citizens. If, on the other hand, it becomes a normal state of only its own residents, a compromise territorial arrangement is more likely.

For all of these reasons, it is high time for Israeli leaders to focus attention on that nation’s serious problems and not attempt to destabilize the lives of Jews in other countries.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.