Israel emerged from the horror of the Holocaust as a defense for the Jews. From this origin arise paradoxical relationships between the Jews of the Diaspora and the State of Israel. As Bernardo Sorj explains: “The State of Israel has delegated to itself the representation of the Jewish people, and a large part of the Jewish institutions of the Diaspora have been transformed into instruments for the defense of the State of Israel from public opinion. Consequences: the support and justification of any government policy and loss of political autonomy.”
Sorj highlights a crucial difference. In the diaspora, Jews as a minority (and often as a persecuted minority) have developed a particular sensitivity to human rights. Jews are the majority in Israel and have been citizens of an occupying state since 1967. Therefore, diaspora Jews found themselves in the paradoxical position of accepting the violation of Palestinian national law by “their” state, sometimes with indignation or extreme reluctance. They became political hostages to Israeli governments that did not elect them.
The story of Israel/Palestine should not be told in cartoon form. The Nakba (Palestinian catastrophe) of 1948 was triggered by Arab countries’ rejection of the UN partition plan, not by a Zionist project of territorial expansion. The 1967 war, which ended with the occupation of the Palestinian territories, was due to the refusal of Nasser’s Egypt to recognize the existence of Israel.
But the ongoing occupation poisoned the Jewish state and gave electoral majorities to the currents committed to expansionism and biblical messianism: the Greater Israel fanatics. The Palestinians are the direct victims of this historic tragedy. Diaspora Jews are their indirect victims.
Netanyahu has assembled the most extremist government in Israel’s history: a coalition that even includes religious fanatics and Jewish racists. The resumption of peace negotiations was sabotaged. It encourages Israeli settlers in the West Bank to humiliate Palestinians on a daily basis. He sought to subordinate the Supreme Court to the parliamentary majority in order to destroy a central pillar of Israeli democracy. He built privileged partnerships with Trump and Bolsonaro. A part of the Jewish diaspora followed his adventure and associated with the extreme right.
Under Netanyahu, Israel’s international image (and therefore that of the Jews) suffered profound damage. The soil on which the ancient tree of antiSemitism grows with its branches to the right and left is fertilized. In the United States and Europe, menacing Stars of David are painted on the facades of Jewish homes and police protect synagogues. The cry “Liberate Palestine, from sea to river,” a slogan expressing the goal of destroying the State of Israel, found its way into the nominally pacifist protests against military action in Gaza. Under the rhetorical façade of antiZionism, antiSemitism pulsates.
The Jewish diaspora does not live in ghettos: it is integrated into the political currents of national societies. Recently, progressive movements in the diaspora have joined the “new left”. Since the October 7 attacks, they have noted with naive dismay that the seeds of antiSemitism are flourishing in identitarian and “decolonial” circles. In these ideological zones, Israel is described as a “racist colonial state” and Hamas’s “resistance cult” is at best only obscured by protocol statements that condemn terror. Leftwing Jews have never been so alone.
The Israelis have serious reasons to get rid of Netanyahu: with him there will be no peace and without peace there will be no security. Diaspora Jews have an existential motive: the government holding them hostage is providing the perfect excuse for the greatest historic wave of antiSemitism since the Holocaust.