The United States’ abstention from the latest UN Security Council vote on March 25, 2024, seems to indicate a widening gap between Israel and its historic protector. Are we witnessing a divorce between Israel and the United States?
The text by Jean-Claude Milner that we are publishing this week was written before this vote, yet it sheds a unique light on it. In it, Milner gives us his analysis of this idyll, seemingly on the verge of ending, a break-up which, in his view, has already been consummated. As is often the case in affairs of the heart, divorce occurs when the illusions that cemented the relationship fall away. Here, the illusions identified by Milner’s analysis are entirely American: they stem from the projection onto Israel, the only democracy in the Near and Middle East, of the values of the American way of life and, above all, of the Western credo of peace. If the United States can abandon its unconditional support for Israel, and seek to place it under trusteeship, it would be because American Jews have long been more identified with the WASP world than with the Jewish world.
Milner’s radical analysis is crystal-clear, but is it really the last word in history? It seems to us to provide food for discussion, and so we add a commentary signed by Danny Trom and Bruno Karsenti. Just listen to the speech by Jewish Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, and you’ll find a living European perspective at the very heart of American power. Criticism of the form taken by Israeli military policy today can indeed be an authentically Jewish position. This was the point of the text “Gaza: How To Get Out”, which we published in K. two weeks ago. And Chuck Schumer’s recent speech[1] seems to testify to this kind of political awareness, steeped in European history.
As if echoing these issues, this week we also publish Macha Fogel’s latest column. Her dive into the Yiddish world leads her this time to the Satmar current, whose Yiddish-language press irrigates the Hasidic world from Brooklyn. How do these Jews, American but not WASP-identified, anti-Zionist yet concerned about antisemitism on campus, talk about the war in Gaza?
Notes
| 1 | “My last name is Schumer, which derives from the Hebrew word Shomer, meaning ‘guardian’. Of course, my first responsibility is to America and New York. But as the first Jewish majority leader in the U.S. Senate, and as the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in U.S. history, I also feel very strongly my responsibility as Shomer Yisroel, meaning guardian of the people of Israel. Throughout Jewish history, there have been many Shomrim, and many of them were far greater than I claim to be. Nevertheless, this is the position I find myself in today, at a time of great difficulty for the State of Israel, for the Jewish people and for Israel’s non-Jewish friends alike.” |
