There is a very particular sort of cognitive dissonance that only money can clearly produce. In the weeks and months following 7 October 2023, American Jewish donors gave and gave. The Jewish Federations of North America raised over $650 million through its Israel Emergency Campaign in the months that followed, and the broader surge of diaspora philanthropy exceeded that.

By any measure, this was one of the largest voluntary mobilizations of philanthropic capital in modern history, both Jewish and general.

But this time, the cheques were arriving at the very same moment as the surveys, the campus protests, and the oh-so-anguished op-eds. The hand writing the cheque and the hand receiving it no longer belonged to the same ideological world – that is to say, the staunchly Zionist world.

The American Jewish relationship with Israel has always been a sort of long-distance marriage that has its rough patches; it is intense, financially entangled and occasionally maddening for both parties. What is new in this arrangement is that the younger partner has ceased to pretend that this relationship is at all simple.

If we are to understand just how much the structural dependency of this contract has deepened and contorted, we ought to start not with the emergency campaigns, but with the otherwise ordinary ones. The New Israel Fund, founded in 1979 as a vehicle for the Jewish progressives of the diaspora to support Israeli civil society, has channelled $350 million to over 900 Israeli organizations over its lifetime. Its annual budget hovers around $30 million. It is, by most credible estimates, the largest single foreign donor to progressive causes in Israel.

In a great many ways, NIF, among the many other American Jewish philanthropic organizations, has built the State of Israel from the ground up. And when the state faltered in the immediate aftermath of 7 October, when governmental institutions were overwhelmed and disoriented, it was precisely this diaspora-funded infrastructure that helped to identify the dead and the kidnapped, and organized support for the hundreds of thousands of people displaced from the north and the south; the cheque-writers had quietly constructed an alternative state.

Israel is indubitably a wealthy country. Its GDP exceeds that of Poland and Portugal and Spain. And yet, despite this, its civil society, particularly on the progressive side, remains substantially reliant on........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)