What it means to be a critical friend of Israel

Furthermore, the Jewish people knows from bitter experience what it means to be denied rights, exiled and persecuted. “Beware,” wrote the great 19th-century Orthodox rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, “lest in your state you make the rights of anyone dependent on anything other than the simple fact of their humanity… With any diminution of this human right the door is thrown wide open to … the wilful mistreatment of other people.”

“This is connected to the occupation,” a once right-of-centre colleague said as we discussed the current crisis. Inequality and injustice don’t stay on the far side of partition walls, however high. Arab and Palestinian leaders bear their great share of responsibility for the failure to find a pathway to coexistence.

But 55 troubled years of controlling another people, with all the surveillance and humiliation this inevitably entails, have infiltrated all aspects of Israeli life.

I’ve stood on the rooftop of an East Jerusalem Palestinian home and watched the neighbouring house being demolished. I’ve witnessed the appropriation of Palestinian farming land.

"We need your voices,” stressed the Israeli rabbi I was accompanying.

Critics of diaspora critics say, “You can’t criticise Israel unless you’ve risked your blood for the country.” It’s an important and humbling caution. We who live abroad are also deeply conscious of wanting to do nothing to strengthen the hand of those who hate Israel and deny its legitimacy.

But, rightly or wrongly, Israel’s actions and the moral reputation of Judaism are bound together in the eyes of the world. Diaspora Jews therefore have more at stake in Israel than seeing it as their ultimate refuge. Indifference is not a Jewish option.

Furthermore, Israel’s current crisis, epitomised by the administration’s plans to make the judiciary subservient to governmental will, is not only political but theological. Is God the god of the settlers who believe that Eretz Yisrael Shelemah belongs by divine right within the borders of the Jewish state, irrespective of its present population?

“I thought God was Jewish,” a scholar raised in a settler community told me, “until I read Abraham Joshua Heschel: ‘What is an idol? Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you.’”

Similarly, is Orthodoxy, especially ultra-Orthodoxy, the only form of Judaism deserving of state recognition and funding, to the detriment of other streams and contrary to the demands of equality, especially of women and people who are gay?

Israel’s present struggle is not only about the preservation of true democracy, including the supremacy of justice, equal rights for all and the protection of minorities, as if that were not enough. It concerns the very nature of Judaism and Judaism’s moral reputation.

Therefore, far from turning our backs on Israel in this hour of emergency, we must commit ourselves more deeply.

But we need to choose how we show that support. To my mind it must be directed to all who truly uphold Judaism’s core values: justice, integrity, the dignity of all human beings, and — despite all the setbacks — the elusive search for peace.

Jonathan Wittenberg is senior rabbi of Masorti Judaism