The Jewish Agency and the Death of 'the Diaspora'

This past week, the Jewish Agency for Israel officially undertook what has been seen by some as a radical shift in the organization's agenda. Instead of focusing on pushing aliyah (immigration of Jews to Israel), they are now re-branding with the goal of fostering a global Jewish identity centered on connection to Israel. The entire "strategic vision", tiresome ambiguous language and all,  is available to read on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's Fundermentalist blog (despite the kitschy name, the blog is firmly ideologically Zionist; Islamic and Christian fundamentalists beware, your Jewish equivalents are winning on the pun front). You can also connect via their hip new online presences on Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook (possibly the only Facebook group listed as being founded in 1929).

While the Anti-Defamation League condemns the blaming and targeting of 'diaspora' Jews for the crimes of the Israeli state, the Jewish Agency is fanning the flames of anti-Semitism by telling the world that yes, Jews and Israel are basically one and the same. With agencies like this, who needs racist skinheads? Indeed, instead of offering inclusive 'Jewish Education', they offer "Jewish-Zionist education" (and yet, the Agency is against hyphenation when it comes to mixed marriages). In actuality, not only does this betray the diverse beliefs and practices of the worldwide Jewry they claim to represent, but their organization's own history. Originally founded to represent Jews under the British Mandate, the then-named Jewish Agency for Palestine brought together both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews, the latter of whom advocated for unity rather than partition from the indiginous Arab population. Historical mistakes give way to historical revisions, and thousands of years of Jewish history is now reduced to serving a hundred year old nationalist ideology.

The Jewish Agency's overhaul is coming at the heels of Peter Beinart's much talked about article in the New York Review of Books, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment." In the article, Beinart, a commited Zionist, voices concern over how many young American Jews are not as connected to Israel as their parent's generation, with many having "a near-total absence of positive feelings." For mainstream organizations for whom Jewish identity is quantifiably measured by the number of Israeli flags one owns, the studies cited by Beinart are a cause to panic. However, rather than following Beinart's line of reasoning, which faults the decline on these organization's all-or-nothing support for conservative Israeli policies conflicting with the liberal values of young American Jews, the Jewish Agency has decided to bypass legitimate questions of ethics in favor of selling their pandering, over-simplified identity politic that assumes their targetted demographic is entirely amoral idiots. To use a Passover analogy, they are speaking as if young Jews are all 'the simple son', and anyone who criticizes the Zionist project is 'the wicked son' and falls outside the limits of what can constitute a Jewish identity. I might as well get my foreskin reattached.

This philosophy is really nothing new, but still, the strategic de-emphasis on aliyah to Israel in favor of further boosting the centrality of Israel in the modern Jewish identity is significant for several reasons. For one, they recognize that Israel's survival does not only depend on guns and tanks, but on the dissemination of propaganda throughout the gentile world justifying it's use of guns and tanks, and in America, advocating for continued unconditional aid to purchase said guns and tanks. They recognize that barriers preventing Jews from assimilating into Western societies are mostly disappearing, so if they're going to be rubbing elbows with the goyim, they might as well be guilted into serving as de facto spokespeople for Israel. Just last year, the Jewish Agency released this offensive ad campaign suggesting that the children of mixed marriages were "lost Jews"; their new strategy seems to ignore those sort of awkward racial purity concerns, and even references the possibility of having 'multiple complimentary identities', although implicitly the Jewish part of the identity must be an ardent Zionist.

Secondly, they acknowledge that today "the vast majority of Jews live in freedom [from anti-Semitism]", and thus aliyah is now "a choice that grows from Jewish identity and from spending extended periods of time in Israel." This conflicts greatly with Israel's reason d'etre, which is that a Jewish state is neccesary to serve as a safe haven that persecuted Jews can flee to. It also conflicts with the hype surrounding 'the new anti-Semitism' that Jewish Agency head honcho and chutzpah hawker Natan Sharansky saw as a major threat to 'diaspora' Jews just a few years ago, ominouisly warning about it in a Jerusalem Post article entitled "Anti-Semitism in 3D" (to be fair, although there hasn't been a resurgance in pograms, Sharansky did predict the revival of 3D movies). Today, Sharansky sings a different shpiel, claiming that "the main danger facing the Jewish world today is a weakening of the connection of young Jews to their people and to the State of Israel." If this is our 'main danger', we should always be so lucky.

There are those in Israel who see the Agency's new identity-before-aliyah approach as a gamble that probably won't work, such as chairman of the World Zionist Organization Avraham Duvdevani, who stated, "Israel's demographics mean we cannot afford to wait for Zionism to come about as a by-product. Aliyah is this country's oxygen." As an advocate of settlements, Duvdevani's oxygen analogy is apt, as the destructive power of fire also requires oxygen to spread. Many of those making Aliyah today, especially those from particularly marginalized groups, are set up in West Bank settlements, serving as human shields for IDF bases and an expansionist agenda. Even within the 67 borders, Israel is probably the most dangerous place in the world for Jews right now, evidenced by the large numbers of Israelis doing a reverse aliyah and emigrating out of their own country. Is it a surprise American Jews don't want to make the shlep? The Jewish Agency's head of global affairs, Misha Galperin, was also concerned, insisting that "we were once a people without a homeland; we can’t become a homeland without a people." If only people is the issue, certainly there's thousands of Palestinian refugees who would jump at the chance to return to their homeland. Too bad they aren't 18-35 year old American Jews. Perhaps they could increase their demographic desirability by watching more Judd Apatow films?

As Haaretz points out, the Agency's new vision does acknowledge that we are living in a time when Israel "inspires, alienates, and compels", although the only reason given for that alienation is a murky concession of "growing social gaps in Israel which weaken the Zionist ideal of building the state as a light unto the nations." As a Jew who believes in learning something besides 'how to construct a ghetto' from my ancestry's history of oppresion, there is a lot more regarding Israel that I'm critical of besides that it isn't living up to my Zionist ideals of state-building. Frankly, I don't have any 'Zionist' ideals, because the label doesn't define me, nor does it define a growing number of dissident Jews both in the 'diaspora' and Israel.

Throughout this post I used quotes around the word 'diaspora' because I see it's usage as problematic. Over several hundred years, Jews have made themselves at home in places as far-apart and different as Hungary, Austria, Iran, Iraq, Russia, France, Morroco, Spain, Turkey, Syria, England, Poland, Ethiopia, India, China, Cuba, Venezeula, America, Palestine, Israel, and elsewhere. Various powers regarded us as not truly belonging in these places, thus emerged the concept that we were in diaspora, that there was a true, mythical homeland where we really belonged and until then we lived as strangers in stranger lands. But the truth is, the cossacks, Nazis, and Christian nationalists were wrong, and Jewish culture belonged and flourished wherever it existed, and wherever it now exists. There is no center. There is no true national or cultural homeland that is worth justifying the misery and oppression of another people. And there is no diaspora. Jews, welcome home.