On Monday morning, news broke that controversial, far-right, probable soon-to-be government minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, while in coalition talks with Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed support for an amendment to existing Israeli policy that would no doubt harm relations between American Jews and Israeli Jews. This change relates to aliyah – who is considered Jewish enough to move to the Jewish state.

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Status-quo Israeli policy welcomes converts to Judaism into Israeli citizenship, even converts who underwent the process of becoming Jewish with a rabbi from the Reform movement. The approval of such Jews has drawn the ire of the more observant in Israel, including the rabbinate, which notably launched an open rebellion against the state when hundreds of thousands of Russians began emigrating in the 1990s, some of them with only one Jewish grandparent.

American Jews, the second largest Jewish community on earth, tend to trend liberal on such matters, and they aren't afraid to show it. Comments online after the news broke ranged from: "This lunatic (Ben-Gvir) thinks he gets to decide who qualifies as a Jew and who doesn't," "Ben-Gvir is determined to ruin the state" and "This will be a divorce between American and Israeli Jews." Yaakov Katz, editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, wrote, "This is just the beginning. Hang on tight."

Regardless of whether this more traditional preference on the matter of aliyah has any possibility of becoming a reality, this development has sparked a familiar debate. And I am in a unique position to see both sides when it comes to whether or not American Jews deserve to have an opinion on Israeli politics.

Last week, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times wrote a scathing opinion piece on the heels of the Israeli election, airing fears that "the Israel we once knew," meaning the one that American Jews are comfortable defending, is slipping away. Whether or not to support Israel "will haunt pro-Israel students on college campuses. It will challenge Arab allies of Israel in the Abraham Accords. … It will stress those US diplomats who have reflexively defended Israel as a Jewish democracy that shares America's values," Friedman asserted.

Though I have lived in Israel for barely two months, I can sympathize with some of the bitter reactions to this piece from Israelis, which are based, I believe, in a justified resentment. It's true: Most Diaspora Jews have not served in the Israel Defense Forces, most of us do not understand the language being spoken by the politicians who we want to make certain kinds of decisions and many of us have never even spent a prolonged amount of time in the Jewish state.

When the Executive Council on Australian Jewry published a statement condemning the rise of Ben-Gvir and partner Bezalel Smotrich, comments on their Twitter page ranged from "Stay out of our Israeli election, focus on Australia," to "If you don't like the results of the election, put on your big boy pants, move here and vote" and "With all due respect, Israeli politics can only be by Israelis, in Israel, in Hebrew. … Diaspora communities cannot be a part of it."

This discomfort must be acknowledged as valid. Israel is constantly in the limelight of the international arena, constantly analyzed unfairly, disputed, and placed under harsh scrutiny by those who see the land between the river and the sea as a grand morality play between good and evil. Israelis have a right to feel defensive; they have a right to their ruffled feathers when those who have not spent a day in their shoes feel entitled to explain how they should vote and how they should feel about their reality.

Yet this right does not come without its consequences. If Israeli Jews shifting further and further to the right truly feel that American Jews have absolutely no standing to intrude in their lives, then they cannot expect American Jews to remain vocally supportive of Israel, as Thomas Friedman says, either on campus, in politics or in the diplomatic arena. They would have to rely on support mainly from Evangelical Christians, who unlike American Jews, emphatically support right-wing policies in Israel like annexation of Judea and Samaria and the incorporation of more religious law in the public sector. Such a future, many agree, such a detachment from Israel in the lives of American Jews, is far from appealing.

Tsvi Bisk, a social critic and author of The Suicide of the Jews, said during an interview on his (very Zionist) book: "We (Israeli Jews) have resentment, justifiable resentment, at the hypocrisy and double-standard of the world … our resentment is justified. However, you cannot make rational policy based on an emotional resentment."

What Bisk means by this is: Yes, when an animal is backed into a corner, lashing out is expected. But this impulse cannot infiltrate a society so profoundly that it results in terrible governance. Is American infiltration, what some Israelis go so far as to label a form of cultural imperialism, justified? Probably not. But is doing whatever the hell you want as a response, with no eye on international opinion, let alone on the attitude of half the world's Jews, justified? Definitely not.

The emotional tug of war will no doubt continue to persist. Israelis will be shocked and offended by UNESCO's shameful declaration that Jews have no right to the Temple Mount, which will compel them to vote for radical parties. Jews in the Diaspora will continue to voice their moral condemnations of this, which will only deepen the hostilities.

A solution to this quandary would be for both sides to bite the bullet. If Jews outside of Israel feel so strongly about what is happening in Israel, they should take the advice of those with whom they most disagree and move their lives here. They'll have a stake in the future of the nation and a sturdier platform when speaking for or against its policies.

Simultaneously, Israeli Jews should come to realize that though they are entitled to their choices, they are not entitled to be free of scrutiny and backlash and that what the rest of the world thinks of you does make a difference. No nation has ever been able to survive moral and political isolation, especially not one whose citizens consider millions living overseas to be part of the nation as well.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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A Russian decision to shutter the country's branch of the Jewish Agency, which the country justifies as being due to the Agency's "illegal obtaining of information from Russian citizens," would put serious obstacles in the way of Russian Jews who want to begin life anew in the Jewish homeland.

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"The information" extracted from Russian Jews is likely to be no different from the information I gave to the Jewish Agency in my own process of moving to Israel, which includes a birth certificate, a declaration of health and proof of Jewish lineage from local rabbis. In other words, there is nothing within the Jewish Agency's work that threatens Russia's national security, unless of course one looks to history, and to Russia's modern-day turmoil.

Many have hypothesized that Russia is punishing its Jewish population in response to Israel's support for Ukraine. It is true that when the Soviet Union imposed upon its Jewish population endless bureaucratic obstacles in the 1970s and '80s to prevent them from moving to Israel, it was in part because Israel had aligned itself with the democratic and capitalist west against the Soviet/Arab bloc.

But geopolitics was not the only reason for this burden. Not only did the Soviets make it impossible for Jews to leave, but also they imprisoned, threatened and intimidated thousands of activists in Jewish circles who dared support Israel's existence as a center for Jewish life. Clearly, something other than international alliances was at play.

It just so happens that as this story unfolds, I am reading "Stalin's Secret Pogrom," edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov. The book is a compilation of transcripts from the 1952 show-trial of 15 Jews involved in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a group organized by Joseph Stalin himself to broadcast the richness of Soviet Jewish culture to the rest of the world. The 15 Jews, five of whom were prominent authors and poets, were accused of Zionist conspiracies against the Soviet Union, treason and espionage. Though they were loyal citizens and in fact patriots, their mother country, with scant evidence, executed 13 of them, exiled one and let the remaining Jew die in prison. This horrific event is known today as "The Night of the Murdered Poets."

There is more in common between The Night of The Murdered Poets and Russia's decision to close the Jewish Agency than you may think. Both events, though the latter is (for now) not as gruesome, represent a tradition in Russian culture that extends back even before the ousting of the Romanov family. In times of crisis, be it in 1892 when most citizens lived in poverty, or in 1952 when the stage was being set for the Cold War with the United States, or in 2022 when international opinion turns on the Russians for their barbaric and criminal invasion of Ukraine, the Jews become objects of suspicion.

Many Jews today are aware that charges of "disloyalty" – accusations that Jews are more loyal to Israel or to the Jewish community than to their own nation – are antisemitic. What they may not know is that the society that put this trope on the map was indeed Russia. During tumultuous periods, the Kremlin has routinely spiraled into paranoia, and has routinely become convinced that by way of their particular language, culture, religion and homeland, the Jews are plotting to undermine Russian interests. The first institutions and organizations to be targeted are those that fly in the face of the prevailing hegemony. In 1892, it was the shtetl, in 1952 it was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Moscow Yiddish Theatre, and in 2022 it is The Jewish Agency.

Being different, it would seem, is constantly perceived as a threat to Russian security. As long as Jews dare to be Jewish, we are a fifth column, guilty of treason, of espionage, of conspiracy, just by being ourselves.

The man who knows this better than anyone is Natan Sharansky. In 1973, he was denied an exit visa from the Soviet Union to Israel on the pretense that at one point he had received access to Soviet national security information, and therefore could not be permitted to acquire new citizenship. In other words, Russia used the same obtuse technicalities to trap Jews inside the country that they are using today.

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After years of advocating for fellow refuseniks, the KGB arrested and imprisoned Sharansky in 1977. In prison, he was subjected to solitary confinement, his health deteriorated, and he undertook multiple hunger strikes to protest the prohibition of his communication with the outside world.

Sharansky understood then, as he does today, that the Soviets were not punishing him for supporting the existence of a country that was turning toward capitalism and democracy, but for publicly identifying himself as a Jew, and for his unequivocal insistence that Russian Jews were entitled to their human and national rights.

Hebrew is more than a language. It represents the distinctness of the Jewish people, which is why the Soviets outlawed its use. Judaism is more than a faith. It represents the silent rebellion of the Jewish people against a godless society, which is why the Soviets shuttered countless synagogues and religious schools. Sharansky was more than a man. He represented Jewish particularism, the Jewish condition of not fitting in perfectly with the surrounding society, which is why the Soviets locked him up with every intention of throwing away the key.

The Jewish Agency as it stands in Russia in 2022 is more than an organization that processes the paperwork of Jews who are looking to emigrate. It represents the idea that there is life outside of Russia as it barrels further down the path of illiberalism. It represents the longing to connect with one's ethnic and religious identity. The Jewish Agency represents, as the 15 Jews of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee represented, as Sharansky represented, the truism that Jews will never be "just like any other Russian," and therefore Russia has seized the opportunity to shut it down.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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At the beginning of her 2018 speech to global ambassadors at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Einat Wilf, co-author of The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, noted, "Your governments, especially those that continuously fund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), on the one hand claim to want to promote peace by means of two states, and on the other hand effectively pursue a policy that ensures this will never happen."

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Dr. Wilf did not have a crystal ball at the time of her speech. Yet last week, during an appearance with Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas, President Joe Biden did exactly what she decried. Standing next to Abbas, Biden opened his remarks by reiterating his administration's support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with borders drawn on the 1967 lines. Yet later, he dedicated an additional $200 million to UNRWA. It was as if Biden, having heard from Dr. Wilf what he was not supposed to do, went right ahead and did it anyway.

Like Biden, I support a two-state solution. Many Jews in Israel and many Jews in the Diaspora support a two-state solution. We see no problem with most if not all of Judea and Samaria being given to the Palestinians along with the Gaza Strip and appropriate land swaps. The problem – and one could accurately characterize this problem as what collapsed the Israeli left – is that the Palestinians do not support such a solution.

However, you will never hear it from them in such explicit terms. During his appearance with Biden, Abbas stressed the "importance of reestablishing the foundations upon which the peace process was based … the basis of the two-state solution along the 1967 borders."

This is what we in the Jewish world call chutzpah. Abbas failed to mention that Palestinian leadership turned down the opportunity to build a state of their own in 2000, 2008 and 2014.

But Abbas did allude to it. After his assurance that the Palestinians were prepared to accept their right to self-determination in part of the land, he stated: "We say that the key to peace and security in our region begins with recognizing the state of Palestine and enabling the Palestinian people to obtain their legitimate rights in accordance with international legitimacy resolutions, and ending all the permanent status issues, including the Palestinian refugee issue."

Abbas' plea to "end all permanent status issues, including the Palestinian refugee issue" is the red herring, as it is in the arguments of many anti-Israel advocates. This seemingly benign comment winks at the Palestinian belief, which is delusional, that any resolution with the Israelis must come with an assurance that the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 War of Independence and their descendants, who number close to seven million people today, have a right – which they claim (incorrectly) is enshrined in international law – to resettle within the sovereign State of Israel.

This belief is why in 2000, 2008 and 2014, the Palestinians balked at accepting statehood next to a Jewish nation, even as their own sovereignty was close and within reach. As long as refugees could not return to Israel and fundamentally undo the Jewish state's Jewish majority, it was agreed – behind closed doors – that a peace deal was never to be.

Thus, the usefulness of UNRWA. On paper, UNRWA claims to simply provide services – health care, education, social welfare – to the impoverished and immiserated Palestinians living in refugee camps in places like Jenin and southern Lebanon. This claim allows the Palestinian leadership to absorb hundreds of millions of dollars a year from foreign governments – governments that mistakenly believe their aid is contributing to the realization of a two-state solution.

In reality, it is doing the opposite.

Since its founding in 1949, UNRWA has worked tirelessly to incite and prolong the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of working to resettle Palestinians either in surrounding nations or within a nation of their own – as every other refugee rehabilitation program has done since the outbreak of World War II – UNRWA insists on maintaining the designation of Palestinians in Judea-Samaria and Gaza as "refugees from Palestine," even though they are living in what they claim to be Palestine.

UNRWA also demands that Palestinian refugees living overseas and their descendants, many of whom are citizens of other nations such as France, the United States or the United Arab Emirates, remain listed as refugees from Palestine – making Palestinians the only people in the world for whom the title of "refugee" is inherited, and for whom it does not become obsolete once they obtain citizenship in another country. The only way to undo the designation of a refugee is for "return" to be actualized – in other words, for the Jewish State of Israel to cease to exist.

Furthermore, human-rights watchdogs and NGOs have consistently found anti-Semitic incitement, propaganda and justification of terrorism in the curriculum UNRWA provides to Palestinian schools. The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education notes that "UNRWA-produced educational literature contains material that encourages jihad, violence and martyrdom, promotes anti-Semitism and promotes hate, intolerance and lack of neutrality."

It is important to ask Biden how throwing money at an agency hellbent on demonizing the other side of the negotiating table gets us closer to peace. It is the equivalent of throwing gasoline, rather than water, on a burning building.

UNRWA is the main vehicle by which the Palestinians express their desired conclusion to the conflict: to erase the Zionist State of Israel and replace it with an Arab-majority country from the river to the sea. So long as this dream is not realized, UNRWA maintains the status quo. As Wilf put it, "The Palestinians are not refugees because they don't have a state. They don't have a state because they insist on being refugees."

When Biden lends his support to a two-state solution but simultaneously pledges further support to UNRWA, he betrays the promises he has made to the Israeli people to prioritize their security. He also betrays the promises he has made to the Palestinian people to ensure their dignity. This double-cross carries profound implications for the stability of the region.

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The services that UNRWA provides to the Palestinian people can and should be handed over to the Palestinian Authority, or at least to an agency that will assist resettlement and rehabilitation rather than continue the status quo. This is the stuff of actual state building. Unfortunately, so long as UNRWA can rely on millions of dollars in aid from naive and counterproductive administrations, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue, with no two-state solution on the horizon.

I voted for Biden in the hope he would take concrete, strategic steps to reach an agreement in between Israel and the Palestinians. He claims to be doing so, yet all we have seen from this president, like so many before him, are continued miscalculations and meaningless gestures.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was originally published by the Jewish Journal.

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"Zionism is racism" is indeed a pernicious lie. Propagation of this lie has led to both random and organized violence against Jewish people and the marginalization of Jews in their respective nations, from the Soviet Union to Great Britain. Should the claim that Zionism is akin to racism, white nationalism and Nazism penetrate mainstream American circles, it would be a crisis for our community. It would be used to justify hatred against us, isolate us from progressive movements and imperil our status as protected citizens of the United States.

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We crossed into dangerous territory this week when journalist Peter Beinart and Matt Duss, the foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders – two highly respected liberal commentators – publicly compared "The Great Replacement Theory" to opposition to the Palestinians' so-called "right of return." In doing so, they continue the legacy of the "Zionism is racism" libel and deliberately contribute to Antisemitism in the United States and around the world.

The Great Replacement Theory is back in the news this month after a deranged shooter killed 10 black Americans in a parking lot in Buffalo. Like the shooters at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue and Chabad of Poway, the Buffalo assailant subscribed to a conspiratorial worldview that claims an elite cabal of Jews is manipulating demographics in the United States, breeding out white people and opening the borders to people of color to take their place. The theory is based on ideas of racial supremacy and ethnic hierarchy.

The "right of return" is a common policy initiative pushed by anti-Israel advocates. Its foundation lies in the 1948 War of Independence between the nascent State of Israel and surrounding Arab nations, which declared war on the Jewish people and swore to annihilate them. Some 750,000 Palestinians became refugees during the war. Shortly after, upwards of 800,000 Jews from Muslim countries were displaced and absorbed by the new Jewish state. Those who champion "the right of return" claim that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants, who number close to seven million people worldwide, have a "right" enshrined in international law to return to areas inside Israel's borders.

Not only is "return" not a right enshrined anywhere in international law, but Jews worldwide are strongly opposed to this idea, because the settlement of millions of Palestinians inside of Israel would render the Jewish people once again a minority in the region, compromise their means of self-defense and turn Israel into "Palestine from the river to the sea." This is the goal of the "right of return," regardless of the language used to disguise it as justice or human rights.

After the Buffalo shooting, the Anti-Defamation League took to Twitter to condemn "The Great Replacement Theory" for the hateful venom it is. Beinart responded, "The Anti-Defamation League denounces in America the principles it advocates in Israel," referring to the ADL's strong opposition to white nationalist ideas in addition to their support for a Jewish state in the Middle East. Duss then tweeted, "In the Israeli-Palestinian context, 'great replacement theory' is expressed as opposition to the Palestinian right of return, which treats Palestinians as a 'demographic threat.'"

An irresistible narrative then developed in left-wing circles. It claimed that Zionism, because of its intention to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel, is no different from the ideology that animated the antisemite who slaughtered innocents in Buffalo, and therefore Jews around the world who support the existence of Israel are no different than the Nazis who tried to kill them.

Antisemitism has always been a politics of inversion. The alt-right and radical Islamists both revel in accusing the Jews of doing to others what has been done to them. That Beinart and Duss would join this crusade is shameful. As I see it, their argument reinforces an abject lie, and it is of paramount importance that it be addressed as such.

White nationalism and Zionism could not be more different. White nationalists view all white people as just that, a nation deserving of their own self-determination, which they define as an exclusively white society that upholds "white" culture and values. It bears repeating that white people are not a nation. White people are not a "people" with a common history, language, culture or attachment to a piece of land. The separation of "whites" from all other human beings is constructed purely on the pseudoscience of race, external characteristics and a power dynamic of genetic supremacy that they themselves have imposed.

Zionism, on the other hand, is a liberation movement that seeks to attain sovereignty for an independent people. The Jewish people fall under every political definition of a nation, sharing our own history, language, culture and attachment to a homeland. We encompass a vast array of races and ethnicities under the umbrella of the term "Jewish." The founders of Zionism called for a Jewish and democratic state, where equality for minorities was to be enshrined as explicitly as protection of Jewish values.

Additionally, Jewish people are a perpetual minority who have collectively been made to bear the consequences of white supremacy and other forms of hatred that successfully exploited our lack of a state. The right of self-determination for independent nations is indeed universal. No left-wing commentator would ever accuse the Kurds, the Palestinians or the Uighurs of ethnic supremacy in their demand for political independence. However, they see Zionism, the Jewish form of this demand, as immediately evil. This reveals a pathological bias as well as a distinct set of double standards.

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Anti-Zionism, the ideology Beinart and Duss seemingly espouse, the ideology at the core of "the right of return," is closer to white nationalism than Zionism ever was. Anti-Zionism rejects the concept of coexistence in the Middle East, the idea that Jews have equal rights with non-Jews and the fact that the Jewish people are their own nation with the right to defend themselves and decide their own fate. Anti-Zionism, not Zionism, is akin to white nationalism by its very definition, as it is explicitly crafted by the desire to punch down at minorities and subjugate them once again. Zionism is an affirmative, the right of the Jewish people to a country; anti-Zionism is a negation, the denial of this right.

It is therefore incumbent upon us to recognize when demands to eliminate Israel are wrapped in manipulative words. Just as white nationalists twist their true intentions by claiming they're only concerned with immigration, crime or "Western civilization," anti-Zionists are hell-bent on describing their cause as liberation, peace and freedom. The ramifications of both ideologies spell disaster for the Jewish people. I propose that we Jews begin to address calls for the "right of return" as the "Great Return Theory," because they share the same goals and the same strategies to reach these goals as those who propagate white nationalist conspiracy theories.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was originally published by the Jewish Journal.

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