Free riders

The Atlantic's Yair Rosenberg describes a sketch on Israeli television: Israeli Defence Force representatives knock on the door of the wrong apartment. They expect to find a family of one of their soldiers, and to tell them, with deep regret, of the death or grave wounding of their relative. Instead, a Haredi Jewish man answers the door, and before they can speak, he tells them he will never, under any circumstances,enlist in the army. His work of prayer and study matters far too much: for him, for his community, and ultimately for the Jewish community and the State of Israel.

The sketch touched a nerve: the war in Gaza, with its mounting casualties and economic disruption has touched most Jewish Israelis, with a notable exception: the Haredim, or the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community enjoys an exemption from military service. The religious parties in the ruling political coalition fiercely guard this exemption, but the in the parts of Israeli society that bear the financial and human costs of the war, resentment of the Haredim as free riders could bring down Prime Minister Netanyahu's government.

I have a mental image of representatives of the Jewish community knocking on a door, and a different person, representative of a very different free-riding community opening the door: US. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. 

On the fifteenth of this month, Speaker Mike Johnson addressed a different assembly: a group titled "Keep God's Land". This assembly of Jews and (mostly evangelical) Christians has rallied around the goal of preventing partition of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. For significant number of Mr. Johnson's supporters, this will fulfill their particular interpretation of prophesies from the Bible. If this process unfolds according to the prophesies in the Greek (Christian) Bible, the Jewish community can expect a fate no better than the one Hamas imagines for them: conversion or utter destruction. Jewish opponents of partition, of course, see a different future: some of them foresee the arrival of a divinely inspired Moshiach who will usher in a era of peace for all the nations.

Divine intervention and the end of the age will render ordinary politics irrelevant, but until that happens, the project to incorporate all the land west of the Jordan into Israel will come with enormous costs: costs to democracy and freedom, costs in lives and time, and economic costs. The heaviest of these costs, of course, fall on the Palestinian people; next come the Jewish Israelis. After that comes the Jewish community in the diaspora, who contribute to funding appeals for Israel and who, unjustly, field almost all the criticism directed at supporters of the worst Israeli policies.

When US Representative Ilhan Omar visited Columbia University last week, she said: 

“I think it is really unfortunate that people don’t care about the fact that all Jewish kids should be kept safe, and that we should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students, whether they’re pro-genocide or anti-genocide.”

Ms. Omar phrased this badly, but she articulated an underlying, brutal, truth: some of the plans seriously advanced on the right in both Israel and the United States do amount to genocide. The problem, as with so much of what politicians say about this war, lay not with what she said but what she omitted: among supporters of genocidal policies toward the Palestinians, conservative Christians considerably outnumber Jews. 

Many of the conservative Christians who support Mike Johnson count themselves supporters of Israel, even calling themselves "Christian Zionists". Yet the policies these people urge on the State of Israel carry huge costs: huge economic expenditures for war and repression, international isolation, years out of the lives of most Jewish Israelis, the young men and women who return seriously disabled or do not return at all, the moral injuries that come with war and occupation. When Israelis knock on the door of the "Christian Zionists", what do they hear? The "Christian Zionist" community will support funding for Israel's defence - largely from the US treasury, not their own pockets. In almost all other areas, the willingness or ability to carry the burden ends there. The Jewish community, in Israel and to a lesser extent in the diaspora, bears all the other costs.

I take two lessons from this. First, those protesters appalled by the slaughter in Gaza should take a much harder look to the "Christian Zionists" and others who call for genocide from the sidelines. At least, don't assume support for genocide will come from Jewish people; more Christians than Jews support proposals that necessarily entail the destruction of the Palestinians as a people. Second, to the "Christian Zionists": my brothers and sisters, don't do that. Don't call for the destruction of a people, and policies that can only end in enduring trauma for Israeli society from the sidelines. Take to heart what Paul says: we cannot predict the coming of the Lord. 

For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.- 1 Thessalonians 5:2

Don't advocate for the oppression, dispossession and destruction of a people, and then leave our Jewish brethren to take the blame.