Responsibility, the Jewish Diaspora, and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process

Recent critical work about the Jewish Diaspora and Israel explores the relationship by which Diaspora Jews are assumed, presumed or expected to support the Jewish State. Often this literature takes a dim view of the Israeli government’s efforts towards achieving a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians, and in some cases takes the position that the Jewish State somehow contradicts Jewish values. Implicit in such debates is the underlying question of responsibility, and in particular of how the Jewish Diaspora can be held to be responsible for the security policies of the Jewish State. Public statements by Peter Beinart and Antony Lerman offer variations of this theme: that there are political and moral responsibilities in the relationship between the Jewish Diaspora and Israel. As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict carries on into a seemingly perpetually violent future, hope for a just peace, or any peace, is becoming increasingly difficult to believe in. For Diaspora Jews who have long had strong attachments to Israel, this situation poses a challenge. The challenge, as I argue in this paper, is one of responsibility. What account of responsibility frames the Diaspora’s relationship with Israel, and what account ought to inform Diaspora Jewry’s relationship with Israel? The paper unpacks this theoretical question by first exploring how Diaspora Jews can be viewed as being complicit in the Occupation of the West Bank and in denying Palestinians their right to self-determination. The underlying position in such a view is that to be a Zionist and to support Israel is to support a state that is seemingly incapable or unwilling to make peace with the Palestinians, and that such a position involves a moral responsibility. The problem with this position is that it conflates having a responsibility with being responsible. It is possible to have a responsibility to act (for example) in particular ways, but that does not mean that the same actor is responsible for the behaviour of others with whom this actor has a relationship. The issue here is twofold. The first is about the different definitions of responsibility, including the distinction between moral and political responsibility. The second is about the extent to which the concept of responsibility also involves an account of causation. These various positions become conflated in much debate about Jews and Israel, and largely in the context of the ongoing failure of the peace process. This paper seeks to bring some clarity to this debate, by taking apart the different ways in which responsibility is understood, and will offer some conclusions on the place of responsibility in the Jewish Diaspora’s relationship with Israel.