American Prospect correspondent Gershom Gorenberg offers a trenchant, personal look at the difficulties facing religious Jews who take a critical stance toward Israeli policies, and at the dangers that fundamentalist Zionism poses not only to Israel, but to Judaism itself:
The tension of being an Orthodox dove is partly sociological. Most Israeli Jews with whom I could pray don’t share my political views. Most Israelis who share my politics do not understand why I enter a synagogue. More basically, the presumption of the society in which I live is that one cannot be an Orthodox critic of the occupation. That matching up of the political divide and the secular-religious one is a mistake. For a religious dove, however, there is an additional dimension to the argument about territories, settlements, and peace: The stakes are not only the future of one’s country but also of one’s religion.
[…]In the public sphere in Israel, Judaism is identified with the worship of land, not with the pursuit of peace. For those of us in a half-visible minority of a minority, that’s one more pressing reason to end the occupation.
Read Gorenberg’s piece in its entirety here.