A boost to Israel-Diaspora relations, but no panacea
It is no secret that outgoing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his rightwing, religious allies have challenged Israel’s relationship with Jewish communities in the Diaspora, in particular the leadership of US Jewry.
During the last stable government of 2015 to 2020 in particular, several high-profile arguments broke out between Netanyahu and the lay and religious leadership of Jewish communities in the US that soured relations significantly.
And at the same time, the policy direction of Netanyahu and his government on other issues, especially the conflict with the Palestinians, raised the ire of many progressive and liberal Jews in North America and beyond.
Meanwhile, a recent Pew report on US Jewry demonstrated that attachment to Israel has declined in the last eight years, particularly among Jewish youth who also demonstrated increasing detachment from the Jewish people and the Jewish religion.
So what will the new government and new prime minister, freshly installed, mean for the Jewish state’s relationship with its Jewish brethren abroad?
It is firstly important to recall exactly what the worst disputes were between Netanyahu’s government and the Diaspora leadership over the last six years.
From the outset, the 34th government of Israel in May 2015 proved to be one of the most challenging to the formal relations with US Jewry’s leadership.
The government was the most rightwing, and most conservatively Orthodox and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) that had ever been established, and its ministers and MKs from the outset denigrated and attacked haredi Jews and Judaism, rousing the ire of America’s liberal and progressive Jewish communities.
Things deteriorated in 2016 when Netanyahu’s government passed a law banning Reform and Conservative converts from using state-funded mikvaot, circumventing an early High Court of Justice ruling on the issue.
And the relationship was sorely tested when after the historic Western Wall agreement providing for a state-recognized egalitarian prayer section at the southern end of the Western Wall was signed in 2016, Netanyahu’s government indefinitely suspended the agreement in 2017 due to haredi pressure.
Combined with incendiary rhetoric against progressive Jews and explosive legislation on conversion, relations between the Israeli government and the leadership of US Jewry hit a nadir perhaps not reached in the past.
The wounds this crisis caused never really healed, with the leaders of the haredi movements in particular saying that Netanyahu basically ignored them and failed to meet with them ever since.
And Netanyahu’s predilection for the US Christian Evangelical community, which, unlike US Jews, never criticized him or demanded anything of him, became ever greater, with his ambassador Ron Dermer and others putting special effort into this relationship while disregarding large parts of the US Jewish community.
Hand in hand with this development was Netanyahu’s strong embrace of Donald Trump, whose illiberal policies and America-first nativist nationalism repulsed much of Jewish America.
If Israel’s policies under Netanyahu toward the Palestinians were not to the liking of liberal US Jewry, his convivial and personal relationship with Trump was total anathema, and associated Israel with everything progressive Jews hated.
But the advent on Sunday of the new Israeli government and the new Israeli prime minister brings with it the possibility of a new direction for the relationship of Israel and its largest Diaspora.
New Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is the son of US immigrants who spent significant amounts of time living in the US. He is Orthodox, but with a liberal attitude to religious life like many US Jews, and during his political career served as Diaspora Affairs minister.
In that role, he upgraded the long neglected egalitarian section of the Kotel, met with non-Orthodox leaders in the Knesset, and more broadly rejected the antagonistic attitude of the Orthodox parties, not to mention elements of his own party, toward progressive Jews.
Many of the ministers and representatives of the new government and state institutions dealing with the Diaspora are from the liberal end of the political and religious spectrum.
Incoming Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai served as a senior official in what is the primary organizing body of US Jewry, the Jewish Federations of North America; head of the Knesset Diaspora Affairs Committee is liberal Meretz MK and a Harvard Wexner fellow Yair Golan; the likely next head of the Jewish Agency is Orthodox liberally minded MK Elazar Stern, while the incoming president is Isaac Herzog, who has spent the last three years liaising closely with Diaspora Jewry as chairman of the Jewish Agency.
In addition, the new government does not include either of the two haredi parties which aroused the hostility of US Jews with their rhetoric.
Along with incoming foreign minister and alternate prime minister Yair Lapid, who is deeply aware of the importance of the US Jewish community’s support for Israel, the new government and its ministers appears to be far better disposed to the concerns and needs of Diaspora Jews than the outgoing one.
But all this does not mean that all the problems of the past will be erased with one fell swoop.
The concerns of progressive Jews in the Diaspora with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians will not be assuaged by the current government, because with significant parts of it dedicated to Netanyahu’s policy direction and positions even further to the right, including the prime minister, little change will happen on that front.
Changes in religious life in Israel toward greater pluralism for the non-Orthodox will also not be easy given the tiny majority the new government has and its need to increase that majority, with the only likely source the haredi parties, who Bennett invited to join his new coalition during his maiden speech as prime minister on Sunday.
Aggravating them with a raft of reforms to religious life would put the nail in the coffin of that idea.
Critically, relations between Israel and the Diaspora depend not just on Israel, but also on that Diaspora.
According to the latest Pew report, affinity to Israel among US Jews is on the wane compared to the last report back in 2013. Strikingly, over half of US Jews between 18-29 now say they have very little or no attachment to Israel.
With Jewish religious identification decreasing among American Jews at the same time, the challenges for reinvigorating and revitalizing the Israel-Diaspora relationship appear to be very clearly on both sides of the ocean.
The new government is far better placed to repair the strained relationship than the outgoing one.
The new ministers will not insult non-Orthodox Jews, will not denigrate them or their beliefs, and will not push to exclude them.
But mending the damage that was done, with the internal political dynamics of Israel and the internal religious and political dynamics of Diaspora Jewry, means that the new coalition will be no panacea for improved relations either.
Only hard work, commitment, and serious investment by both sides will yield results.