The Grief of Estrangement

There is a particular kind of grief that has no clean name — the grief of loving something so completely that you never thought to examine the conditions of that love, until the day you realize the conditions have been violated so thoroughly that the love itself has changed shape. It is the grief of estrangement, not from a stranger, but from a part of yourself.

That is what is happening between American Jewry and Israel. And it is worth understanding precisely, because the deterioration is not a political development. It is a human one. It follows the same arc that governs the fracturing of any bond that begins as unconditional — the slow, stage-by-stage reframing of a love that cannot quite bring itself to end, until one day it finds that it already has.

The Origin: Identity Before Evaluation

American Jewish support for Zionism and for the State of Israel did not begin as a policy position. It began as something closer to an extension of self. In the shadow of the Holocaust, the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948 was not merely a geopolitical event — it was a reconstitution of Jewish existence after its near-annihilation. For American Jews, many of them one or two generations from the shtetl, many of them carrying the specific silence of families that had lost everyone, Israel was not a foreign country whose policies one assessed. It was the answer to the worst question the twentieth century had asked.

This is what unconditional solidarity looks like at its origin: it is pre-evaluative. The parent who loves the newborn has not assessed the child’s merits. The child simply is, and that being is already loved. American Jewry’s early relationship with Israel had the same structure. Israel simply was — and that being was already embraced, defended, funded, and prayed for, regardless of what it did or failed to do.

The institutions built around this solidarity — the federations, AIPAC, the Jewish Agency, the UJA campaigns — were not lobbying organizations in the ordinary sense. They were expressions of ontological kinship. You do not lobby for yourself. You simply show up.

The First Strains: Disappointment Absorbed

Unconditional bonds are not fragile, but they are not inert either. They can absorb enormous strain — and for decades, the American Jewish relationship with Israel absorbed a great deal of it.

The 1967 war deepened the solidarity. The Yom Kippur War, with its terrifying early days, produced an outpouring of American Jewish support that was visceral and immediate. Even the Lebanon War of 1982, which troubled many, did not crack the bond. The mechanism of absorption was always the same: the behavior that caused pain was explained, contextualized, and ultimately excused on the grounds that Israel existed in an existential situation that American Jews, living in safety, were not fully positioned to judge. This was not dishonest reasoning. It was the reasoning of a family that closes ranks.

The Oslo period briefly suggested that the strains might resolve themselves — that Israel was moving, however fitfully, toward the values that American Jews held most dear: compromise, coexistence, the recognition of the other’s humanity. When Oslo collapsed, it produced not just political disappointment but something closer to the second stage of what would become a long deterioration: the first accumulation of events that could not be entirely excused.

The settlement enterprise’s acceleration through the 2000s, the repeated failures of negotiation, the 2008 and 2014 Gaza campaigns with their television-scale civilian casualties — these were absorbed, but the absorbing became harder each time. Explanations were offered and accepted, but they required more effort with each iteration. The bond held. But it was no longer........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)