The State of Israel vs. the Jews

August 1, 2021
A French author who spent more than a decade in Israel laments the seemingly insurmountable gap between the promise and the present-day reality of Zionism in Israel. As Cypel, former senior editor at Le Monde and the author of Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse (2007), writes, in terms of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the more it changes, the more it stays the same. The author delineates how decades of strife have so degraded the essence of the original founding ethos of the state--"one primarily rooted in a progressive conception of humanity and society"--that Israel today is unrecognizable to its own Jews and those in diaspora. The military state, whose tactics include systematic cruelty, colonial racism, and dehumanization, is aimed at wearing Palestinians down and pushing them out. As the world looks away, Cypel writes, Israel can act with impunity; the real test is not how far the Israeli government can push the Palestinians, but how far Israeli society will "go in its acquiescence." Making effective use of solid sources--newspaper articles, interviews, speeches, and others--the author regards the recent passage of the "Basic Laws," defining who gets to be a citizen, as a chilling example of how the nation-state has grown more insular and "hyperethnocentric." As Cypel shows, all of the following have led to the alienation of the Jewish diaspora, especially in America: enlarging the settlements and pushing the Palestinians into areas around cities; racism toward African asylum seekers; massive weapons sales to authoritarian, antisemitic states; censoring of humans rights leaders and harassment of dissident groups; and the courting of the Trump administration and his evangelical cronies. So what about the future? "If the State of Israel wants to survive without fundamental changes," writes the author, "it will be forced to gradually enforce a totally structured, codified apartheid. In Israel, Cypel effectively argues, force has triumphed over international law.

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September 6, 2021
Journalist and self-described anti-Zionist Cypel (Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse) delivers an impassioned if one-sided critique of Israel’s “rightward drift” since the 1967 Six-Day War that resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Cypel details acts of violence committed against Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and civilians, describes the discriminatory treatment of non-Jewish citizens by the Israeli government, and notes that technologies developed by Israeli cybersurveillance firms were used by Saudi Arabia to track journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated in 2018. Cypel argues that these and other “appalling” actions by modern-day Israel (“a racist, bullying little superpower”) conflict with the tenets of Judaism and have led “to a widening political and cultural gap between Israeli and American Jewish life.” But he barely mentions previous attempts by the Israeli government to trade land for peace, and downplays anti-Israeli rhetoric and actions by Iran and other countries in the Middle East. Readers looking for a more balanced and incisive treatment of this subject would be better served by Daniel Gordis’s We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel.