Why diasporic Judaism is the safest path forward for Jews worldwide
Jews have lived in diaspora since 70 CE—about two thousand years. The State of Israel has existed since 1948 CE, a mere seventy-eight. Even if you include the biblical period of about 550 years when Jews ruled kingdoms in Israel, the diasporic experience is far more typical for any given Jew throughout history than the experience of living in a sovereign Jewish political state.
As hard as it might be for us to believe now, in an age where the US federal government and many European governments equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, Zionism was a minority position among Jews until the 1940s. As the activist and writer Molly Crabapple details in her excellent book Here Where We Live Is Our Country, members of Jewish groups in Eastern Europe, most notably the General Jewish Labor Bund, advocated doykeit (hereness), fighting for Jewish cultural rights and socialism in Europe alongside non-Jews, over emigration. Meanwhile, orthodox Jews fiercely opposed secular attempts to resettle the Holy Land, hewing to the “three oaths” in Tractate Ketubot 111a of the Talmud: “that the Jews should not ascend to Eretz Yisrael as a wall, i.e., en masse, whereas individuals may immigrate as they wish,” “that the Holy One, Blessed be He, adjured the Jews that they should not rebel against the rule of the nations of the world,” and “that the Holy One, Blessed be He, adjured the nations of the world that they should not subjugate the Jews excessively.” The Talmud stipulates that the coming of the Messiah will be what reinstates Jews in Israel.
What changed many diasporic Jews’ minds about Zionism and the desirability of a Jewish state in Israel was the Shoah and the death of the six million, followed by continued pogroms and virulent antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe even after the Nazis had been defeated. The Talmud’s third oath—“that…the nations of the world…not subjugate the Jews excessively”—had been broken. Considering the horrors of the Shoah, the desire to have a Jewish homeland as a refuge made perfect sense. And had Israel been uninhabited, a tabula rasa ready for settlement, things would have been straightforward. But Palestine was already populated, and the Palestinians didn’t want a Jewish ethnonationalist state on their land. The rabbis of the Talmud clearly didn’t have the complicated, bloody history of Palestine/Israel in the 20th and 21st centuries in mind when they discussed the prohibition on returning to Israel “as a wall,” but looking at the bloodshed and mass displacement of Palestinians caused by the 1948 war and Israel’s present descent into genocide, bombing campaigns in Lebanon, and incitement of the US’ war with Iran, the rabbis’ sense of skepticism about political salvation feels prescient.
While far-right Jewish supremacy in Israel has radicalized and intensified in the last few decades, with the genocide in Gaza killing over 70,000 Palestinians and leaving millions homeless and destitute, all of this has been a long time coming. Merely three years after the end of World War II, in a letter to the editors of the New York Times from December 2, 1948, Jewish luminaries including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein wrote of Menachem Begin and the Freedom Party that “among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (T’nuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties,” noting that “within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.” They decried a massacre perpetuated by Begin’s militia in Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, where hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed and noted that Begin’s party committed “terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike).”
Begin would go on to wage a long campaign to shift the center of Israeli political discourse, running for prime minister eight times before finally being elected prime minister in 1977 on his ninth attempt and founding the Likud party. For Begin, the West Bank and Gaza, despite being heavily populated by Palestinians who sought self-determination and a state of their own, constituted an integral part of Israel. As illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank do today, Begin always referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria.” Under his tenure, the Israeli economy was subjected to extensive privatization, Jewish settlements in the West Bank expanded threefold, Palestinian statehood was officially ruled out, and Israel invaded Lebanon, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties.
It isn’t difficult to link Begin with the present moment. Benjamin Netanyahu is a member of the political party Begin founded and shares many of Begin’s economic positions and willingness to use violence against the Palestinians. Netanyahu has likewise reduced social spending in favor of massive military spending, rebuffed efforts to establish a Palestinian state, and supported settlements in the West Bank, which have increased substantially under his government due to considerable financial investment. His government also indirectly supported Hamas in the years leading up to October 7, even encouraging Qatari cash infusions to the terrorist organization as part of a strategy to prevent the Palestinian Authority from establishing a functional, independent Palestinian state.
Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, has bragged that settlement plans which would cut the West Bank in two will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state” and has called for large swathes of occupied Gaza to be settled as well, advocating the “conquest” of the Gaza Strip. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right Israeli security minister, released a plan on September 3 calling for the forced removal and deportation of all 2 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. As detailed in The Guardian, Ben-Gvir is constructing an execution site for Palestinian prisoners complete with booths for spectators and is in the process of installing a moat with crocodiles around a high-security jail. He seems to relish his cruelty: he recently posted an AI-generated video of emaciated, crying Palestinian prisoners. The Israeli defense minister Israel Katz declared that Israel was “organised and prepared” to expel Palestinians from Gaza “by every way possible.” In the West Bank, marauding gangs of empowered settlers harass, attack, and even kill Palestinians with little accountability, to the point where even former IDF generals view “Jewish terrorism” as an existential threat to the State of Israel.
The peace activist and scholar David Shulman has written eloquently and extensively about these dangers. A damning Amnesty International report about the state of affairs in the West Bank recently found that “ideologically motivated Israeli settlers have terrorized Palestinian communities through repeated raids on their homes and villages, beatings, death threats demanding they leave, persistent harassment, the destruction of property and village infrastructure, cutting off access to water and electricity, and theft of their livestock and belongings. These practices deliberately intensified an already coercive environment aimed at forcibly displacing and dispossessing Palestinians, manifested in state policies of access restrictions, home demolitions, and settlement expansion. Palestinians who have attempted to return have found their villages fenced off or destroyed, or have faced renewed settler attacks, harassment and intimidation, forcing them to flee again.”
Flying in the face of millennia of Jewish teachings which equate each life to an entire universe and instruct us that all human lives are b’tzelem Elohim (in the image of God) (Tractate Sanhedrin 37a), a settler in the West Bank proudly told BBC News that he believes that one Jewish life is equal to 10,000,000 Palestinian lives. Meanwhile, Palestinian journalists who attempt to report on what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank have allegedly been tortured in prisons, facing beatings and rape according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ reports. Things have reached such a pass that even the UK government, historically quite deferential to Israel, has finally denounced “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank.
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Israel is the self-proclaimed “nation-state of the Jewish people.” It purports to “represents the State of Israel, its citizens, and the Jewish people on the global stage.” Benjamin Netanyahu declared in 2015 in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre that “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.” This raises the question of what representation really means. There are currently about 7.15 million Israeli Jews and about 8.57 million Jews in the diaspora. Can a state that only includes about 45% of the group it claims to represent be said to represent that group? Politically speaking, if Israel truly wished to represent world Jewry, then every Jew on the planet should receive a vote in Israeli elections and automatic citizenship without having to make aliyah. Such a prospect, I think it’s safe to say, wouldn’t delight Netanyahu and his friends on the Israeli far right. If anything, one might say that, even in an era where Israel exists, the diaspora is more representative, since about 55% of Jews worldwide live outside of Israel. And what Israel has done and continues to do to the Palestinians is by no means in my name, nor does it represent the 61% of American Jews who believe that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza or the 39% who think that Israel is committing genocide.
Among the arguments that one hears among more pro-Israel Jews in the diaspora is that Israel is a haven, a refuge, a home of last resort, for Jews around the world. If there were ever another Shoah, Israel would take persecuted Jews in and protect them from violent antisemitism. Antisemitism is a real and growing problem—in the United States, Germany, and France, neo-Nazism is on the march; the far right is increasingly unabashed about its antisemitism. I understand why, especially for Jews from older generations who (rightly or wrongly) don’t automatically associate Israel with violent oppression of the Palestinians, the idea of a safe place where one can be proudly Jewish without fear of antisemitism holds such allure.
But I suspect that, when push comes to shove, many Jews in the diaspora wouldn’t feel at home in the Israel of today. The reality is different from older generations’ idealized, outdated vision of an egalitarian society full of kibbutzim. Israel nowadays is a militarized society with compulsory army service where leftists are currently a small fraction of the population and where normal life is predicated upon a far-reaching system of apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza. It is ruled by an authoritarian whose supporters refer to him as a king; who has a last name meaning “God-given”; and whose political party has courted far-right, neo-Nazi parties like Vox and antisemites like Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen, and Geert Wilders.
Nor would Jews of the diaspora feel particularly safe in a country where police have created a climate of widespread fear by raiding youth activist clubs, violently repressing antiwar protests, threatening to deport antiwar protesters to conflict zones, maintaining a special department for monitoring journalists, and assaulting and detaining journalists. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current security chief, belongs to a party called Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), which advocates the establishment of a national immigration authority that will work to expel enemies of the state—Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Reflecting this draconian approach to free speech, Miki Zohar, the Israeli culture minister, recently called for the directors of NAZA, an Oscar-winning documentary about the mass killing of Gazan civilians, to have their citizenship revoked as punishment for supposed “treason against the state.” Recently, masked vigilantes attacked the offices of the left-wing newspaper Ha’aretz and the TV broadcaster Channel 12, and far-right activists have even issued death threats against reporters felt to be too far left.
Not all Israelis support the present government, of course. Hopefully, Israel will drastically change course politically and societally and there will eventually be peace and social justice for Palestinians and Israelis alike. Sadly, such a moment appears extremely distant. The idea of “fortress Israel” is a mirage, comforting for some, but chimerical. If things ever get so bad worldwide that Jews need a refuge because life in the diaspora has become unlivable, whatever refuge they seek is unlikely to hold out for long. Meanwhile, the defensive crouch entailed in maintaining such a fortress mentality births monsters, locking Israel and Palestine into a vicious cycle of violence and retribution whereby the most extreme, fascistic elements on both sides feed off each other for political advantage, as evidenced by the corrupt political alliance between Netanyahu and Hamas.
For many centuries, bereft of political power and military might, Jews developed a remarkable capacity to live in diaspora. This gave Jewish culture and philosophy rare gifts: cosmopolitanism and the ability to see through the illusions of omnipotence so often harbored by regimes which rely upon might and power as opposed to spirit (Zechariah 4:6). Jews traditionally valued learning and spiritual attainments, not brawn and prowess with firearms. Living in diaspora encouraged cultural exchange, openness, internationalism, liberalism, and solidarity. Nation-states in general encourage chauvinism, ethnonationalism, and xenophobia. Even Israel, born of the horrors of the Shoah and populated by survivors and their descendants, is not exempt from these tendencies. Diaspora has not been an idyll: Jews have paid a horrible price for their political weakness. But having a nation-state of one’s own is not a panacea for antisemitism. One can only hope that the price of Israel’s existence will not end up being the soul of Judaism itself.
