Utolsó frissítés: 2026.09.09. — Szerző: Anti-Propaganda News Blog
Members of the Jewish community in the United States say they reject Israel acting on their behalf, especially after Smotrich appeared at the Israel Day parade.
Written by: Simon Speakman Cordall | June 13, 2026.
Long-standing tensions between the progressive Jewish community in the United States and the Israeli government came into focus this month, when Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other far-right Israeli lawmakers attended the annual Israel Day parade in New York.
When Szmotrics—who is known to be wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC)—joined the pro-Israel march on Fifth Avenue, the protesters greeted him with chants of „shame” and „war criminals.”.
The event known as „Israel Day on Fifth” was opposed by many members of the Jewish community who wish to distance themselves from Israel. Due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the participation of some of its intellectual architects, this year’s June event was particularly controversial.
Szmotrics was unimpressed by the calls from progressive Jewish protesters in New York and continued to link the fate of the community to that of Israel—a common refrain among Israeli and American politicians.
„This is a tremendous celebration—a deep bond that unites the entire global Jewish community, bringing together Jews in Israel and the United States. This shared destiny has grown significantly stronger over the past three years,” he said. „The State of Israel is the home of the entire Jewish people. The safety of Jews worldwide rests on the strength and security of the State of Israel. There is no better place to live than Israel.”
Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, kept his campaign promise and skipped the parade. This move was welcomed by American Jewish organizations that are critical of the strong far-right tendencies evident in Israeli politics.
„The Israel Day parade, featuring Israeli politicians who not only cheered on the genocide of the Palestinians but are also part of the government committing that genocide, is not a celebration of Jewish identity or pride. @NYCMayor is aware of this. We are grateful that he is not participating in it,” the Israelis for Peace (Israelis for Peace) and the Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ).
According to European and American Jewish activists, they are frustrated that politicians like Smotrich are exploiting them and their religion to justify the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank.
These include groups such as Voice of American Jews for Peace (JVP) or the UK Na’amod. They argue that the oppression of the Palestinians is incompatible with the modern democratic values that Israel claims to uphold, and they challenge the view that Israel’s existence as a state should be taken for granted.
Against the consensus
Emily Hilton, the Na’amod According to the co-founder, his critical views toward Israel developed after the 2014 Gaza offensive, particularly after the army killed four Palestinian children who were playing soccer on a beach.
„I began to question the acceptance of Zionist ideology as early as my university days,” Hilton told Al Jazeera. „I met liberal Zionists who might have questioned Israel’s policies, but it wasn’t until I got to University College London that I started meeting Jews and Palestinians who were critical of Israel.”
Hilton joined Jewish activist groups in the United Kingdom that held traditional Jewish mourning ceremonies for the Palestinians killed by Israel at the Gaza border during the „Great March of Return.” He later joined a vigil following Hamas’s October 7 attack as well.
Izrael ezt követő gázai háborúja több mint 75 000 palesztin halálát okozta Gázában, és világszerte megváltoztatta egyes zsidó közösségek tagjainak az országhoz fűződő viszonyát.
„More and more people are realizing that we’re right—Israel has lost the moral high ground,” Hilton said. „Whatever claims it once had, it has lost them. Now its only remaining claim is that it acts on behalf of the mainstream Jewish community, and even that seems less and less certain.”
The main political threat to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government—including former right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid—is merely debating the extent to which apartheid and genocide should be implemented,” Hilton said, “and offers no better future for the Palestinians.
„The claim that they are acting on my behalf is, quite frankly, outrageous. Whether it’s the ”polite apartheid’ promoted by Lapid and Bennett or the violence and destruction promoted by the current government, the problem is the system,” Hilton added.
„We must imagine a life beyond Zionism—one based on justice and equality. The State of Israel puts Jewish people in danger by claiming that we are somehow its foot soldiers. We are not.”
Changing opinions
Opinion polls from the United States and Europe reveal differing views among Jewish communities regarding Israel. While some in the U.S. and the U.K. expressed strong emotional ties to Israel following global condemnation of the Gaza war, many are turning away from a country they feel is committing genocide in their name.
„For too long, American Jewish institutions have supported the Israeli government’s actions and parroted its justification that everything it did was in the interest of the Jewish people everywhere,” said Sonya Meyerson-Knox, the Jewish Voice for Peace communications director at Al Jazeera.
„In doing so, they not only supported the Israeli occupation, apartheid, and the genocide of the Palestinians, but they also silenced and marginalized those Jews who opposed these actions, or tried to hold the Israeli state accountable for its war crimes.”
According to Meyerson-Knox, the majority of American Jewish institutions continue to support Israel, despite a „shift in attitudes” within the American Jewish community as a whole.
Analysts told Al Jazeera that support for Israel’s existence has long been a fixed point of consensus among the overwhelming majority of global Jewish communities. But Israel’s three-year offensive in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Iraq—causing the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians—have forced many to question this view.
„For years, the question of Israel has been a point of consensus among Jews in the United Kingdom and the United States. That is increasingly no longer the case,” Keith Kahn-Harris, a sociologist at the Jewish Political Research Institute, told Al Jazeera. „[This] has revealed that the decades-long consensus on what Israel is was, in fact, not accurate.”
He said that even though the centrist political consensus on Israel is waning and anti-Zionist sentiment is growing among young people, we are not yet at the stage where mainstream Jewish communities would question Israel’s future as a state. „They’re heading in that direction, but they still have a long way to go,” he added.
