When I was a college student studying biochemistry, litmus tests were simply a way to confirm the acidity or alkalinity of a substance. If I suspected a substance was acidic, I would test it against a piece of blue litmus paper, expecting the paper to turn red; if I suspected the substance was alkaline, I would test it against a piece of red litmus paper, expecting the paper to turn blue. These were binary tests; I would be proven either right or wrong. They were based on objective facts, not personal opinions colored by past experiences, background or circumstances.
Today, I am a social scientist, not a biochemist, and in that context, a litmus test is something else entirely. I hear the term used most often in the context of politics, where a litmus test is a mechanism by which a politician running for office or a nominee for a judgeship is determined to be qualified or unqualified based on their position on a key issue. Do they support or oppose women’s reproductive rights, do they support or oppose public funding for private schools, do they support or oppose the State of Israel? This, too, can be a binary test, in which a candidate is deemed unqualified if they are not 100% in support of or opposed to a particular position, with no nuances, exceptions or shades of gray. Often, it is more a matter of satisfaction: Is the candidate’s position good enough? If yes, we can consider their positions on other issues; if no, they must be discarded in favor of another candidate whose views on the key issue in question are acceptable.
But the political litmus test is not objectively accurate. If I run a chemical litmus test and my blue litmus paper turns red, I am dealing with an acidic substance; anyone is entitled to their own opinion about it, but opinions that are contradicted by objective facts are simply wrong. Political litmus tests are different, less reliable. That’s why I don’t trust them when it comes to who should be excluded from the Jewish community.
Take, for example, the notion that Israel is an apartheid state. This is a litmus test for much of the Jewish community; the Anti-Defamation League, which provided partial funding for a relevant study I conducted and have previously described for this platform,[1] describes this statement as an accusation that “fundamentally distorts what Israel is”[2] and a key feature of antisemitism on college campuses.[3] The ADL’s stance is very much within the mainstream of opinion among both American Jewish organizations and Jewish adults. However, the notion that Israel is an apartheid state is also a perspective that is held by a significant minority of American Jews; one nationally representative poll from 2021 found that 28% of American Jewish adults held this view.[4] Can we afford to expel a quarter of our population from our community? Should we do so without even exploring their views? I’m not sure that they all understand apartheid the same way, which is why I conducted the aforementioned study in the first place.
The notion that Israel is an apartheid state is a perspective that is held by a significant minority of American Jews; one nationally representative poll from 2021 found that 28% of American Jewish adults held this view. Can we afford to expel a quarter of our population from our community?
The study was about how North American Jews interpret four commonly asked survey questions about Israel, including the extent to which respondents agreed or disagreed with the statement: “Israel is an apartheid state.” First, I asked respondents this standard survey question. Next, I asked them to describe in their own words why they selected their particular responses and what it meant to them to describe a country as an apartheid state. I conducted this research in part because as a social scientist, my job is to collect data systematically in order to draw conclusions about the social world, not to impute malign motives to anyone who holds a heterodox perspective.
Imagine my surprise to discover that among the 1,854 respondents who answered at least one of the open-ended questions on my survey, 113 both described themselves as Zionists and somewhat or strongly agreed that Israel is an apartheid state. On the surface, these are incongruous positions — why would any Zionist, let alone 113 of them, describe Israel as an apartheid state? As it turns out, they fall mainly into four categories:
First, those who describe any mistreatment of Palestinians as apartheid. Some examples, explaining in their own words why they believe Israel is an apartheid state or what they believe it means to describe a state in this way:
- “Palestinians are not treated equally in many areas of Israeli life.”
- “ ‘Apartheid state’ seems like a very inflammatory term, but it does pretty accurately describe the way Palestinians are treated.”
- “Even though the constitution seems to outline rights for all citizens, reality does not seem to reflect that.”
- “Israel keeps the Palestinians separated.”
Each of these statements equates mistreatment of Palestinians with apartheid, but they are short on details. You might agree that their characterizations are correct, or you might think of them as a corollary to Godwin’s Law, a sort of reductio ad apartheidum that amounts to little more than “everything bad is apartheid.” But it is clear that these views exist within the Jewish community, and the people who hold them are upset for moral reasons over the way Israel treats Palestinians, similar to the feelings of many Israelis who are frustrated by their government’s treatment of their neighbors. You don’t have to agree with their perspectives, but should they be expelled from the Jewish community for feeling this way? Or because they do not articulate detailed reasons for feeling this way?
The second group makes clear references to international law or draws parallels to the old apartheid regime in South Africa. Some of them seem to be doing little more than repeating talking points they have heard from advocates, but others have a very clear sense of the 1973 U.N. Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which essentially define apartheid in terms of the South African regime, but also cover “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” Some examples in their own words:
- “The settlers and their backers have the same moral values as those of apartheid South Africa. At the same time, Israel does not have a legal system comparable to apartheid.”
- “Israel clearly oppresses the Palestinians and has a different legal system set up for various Palestinians in different places. This meets the definition of apartheid.”
- “It is not a matter of opinion. It has a legal definition adopted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague: [definition quoted from the Rome Statute].”
If you feel that the accusation of apartheid is antisemitic, should we banish those Jews who feel it is nevertheless justified based on their reading of international legal statutes that were not written to single out Israel? (I concede that there are many times when Israel is singled out.)
The third group consists of folks who say that Israel inside the Green Line is not an apartheid state, but Israel’s control of the West Bank imposes an apartheid system there. On the whole, this group seems to consist primarily of a sort of highly engaged North American Jews, politically left-leaning, if not outright progressive, who feel strongly connected to Israel but for the past 40 years or so have been growing increasingly uncomfortable with Israeli policy toward Palestinians, both in Israel proper, and in the West Bank and Gaza. Some examples in their own words:
- “The territories are governed like an apartheid state.”
- “Israel proper is not an apartheid state, but the de facto military rule in the West Bank, where Jews and Arabs live under different laws, is absolutely apartheid.”
- “Obvious. Different sets of laws in the West Bank for Jews and Palestinians that do not treat these populations equally or fairly.”
- “As far as I know, Israeli Arabs can and do study in Israeli universities and have political representation. But Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have their movement restricted.”
These respondents are largely torn between the Israel they love and feel they used to know, and policies and actions they see that they would and do condemn if they occur anywhere else. They don’t want to think of Israel as an apartheid state, and I think most of them genuinely draw a distinction in their minds between what happens on one side of the Green Line versus the other, but they are calling what happens in the territories “apartheid” for moral reasons, even if they can’t always articulate accurately what makes conditions add up to apartheid instead of other inequities. Should they be banished from the Jewish community?
And fourth, there is a small group of respondents for whom not only is Israel an apartheid state, but they’re glad it is — they feel it is necessary to be an apartheid state, and they want to see more apartheid. Part of the stereotype of people who describe Israel as an apartheid state is that they’re just antisemites redirecting their hatred for Jews in a more socially acceptable direction, and this next group, though they’re not very large, is a real problem for that narrative. Calling this group Kahanists may not be perfectly accurate, but I believe it is a reasonable approximation of their ideology. Some examples in their own words:
- “As I’m taking the survey, Israel is under attack by Islamic Jihad. Israel definitely keeps the Arabs separate from the Jews in some circumstances, and I suppose that may technically meet the definition of apartheid, but it is necessary for safety and security. If the Arabs loved their children more than they hate ours, it would not be necessary.”
- “It has to be. Because so many Muslims are a threat to national security, they have to be separated from the good people. Israel should actually do more to separate them from the Jews and the Christians.”
- “Because it has to be. If Arabs were allowed to mix freely with Israelis, they’d be bombs everywhere every day.”
I have corrected typographical errors in some of the quotes presented in this essay for the sake of readability, but in this last quote, I am uncertain whether “they’d be bombs” reflects the respondent’s intent or if he meant to write “there’d be bombs.” Did he mean to say that there would be bombs everywhere, or did he mean what he actually wrote—that the Arabs he holds in such clear contempt would all strap on suicide vests because he believes that Arabs, as a class of people, are bent on indiscriminate murder? I go back and forth on which reading I find more offensive, and I will ask the same question about this group as I did the previous three: Should we exclude them from our community?
I don’t want to say every Zionist should be included in my community when some Zionists are violent bigots who favor ethnic cleansing over living in peace with their neighbors.
If I look beyond these 113 respondents, at all of the other people who participated in my survey — non-Zionists and anti-Zionists who may or may not agree that Israel is an apartheid state, and Zionists who do not agree that Israel is an apartheid state — many of them explain their responses to the apartheid question using language that is similar to what is described above. Some say they do not agree that Israel is an apartheid state, but they worry out loud about whether conditions might be different in the territories. Others cite examples of ministers in the Israeli government engaging in behavior that parallels hallmarks of apartheid as outlined by the U.N. Convention or the Rome Statute. And there are people in my dataset who vehemently reject the Zionist label, who call themselves anti-Zionists in their comments, who nevertheless also write about how important they believe it is for Israel to exist as a refuge for persecuted Jews. The line between Zionist and non-Zionist or anti-Zionist is thinner than you might expect, as is the boundary between where one might be willing to say that Israel is an apartheid state and where one would resist this description.
Of the four categories of Zionists who believe that Israel is an apartheid state, there is only one I cannot accept in my Big Tent Jewish community. It includes the Kahanists described above. It is not because I find their views abhorrent; there are plenty of people who hold other abhorrent views who I do not feel should be excluded from my community, though I may be personally wary of them. My category for exclusion also includes those respondents who insist that the Jewish people have absolutely no connection to the Land of Israel, that we have no history there, that we have always been nothing but colonialist interlopers stealing land from and committing genocide[5] against another people whose claim to it is legitimate where ours categorically is not.
These are two very different populations, so why do I classify them together? Because what they have in common is that they are absolutists who either cannot see or do not care about the humanity of people who do not share their views. Their zero-sum approach to community and to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict leaves no room for anyone not marching in lockstep with them; they cannot abide the possibility that there might be valid ideas other than their own. Pirkei Avot[6] teaches us that a wise person learns from everyone, but you can’t learn from anyone if you are certain you already have all the answers. Jewish tradition, law and community are built around robust discussion of competing ideas, accepting that there may be more than one right idea,[7] and including and welcoming our fellow Jews even when they have different backgrounds, experiences, knowledge, customs and practices than our own. But as Karl Popper famously argued,[8] this ethos has limits. Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance suggests that if we extend tolerance to the intolerant, they will inevitably destroy the tolerant, and tolerance with them.[9]
I suppose it is appropriate that the litmus test I approve calls for kicking the absolutists out of the Big Tent; it is the exception to my rule that litmus tests should not apply to inclusion in the Jewish community. Ultimately, what is the trouble with social litmus tests? It’s that they don’t work like chemical litmus tests; they are absolute, yet too crude to be used fairly on a community-wide level. I don’t want to say every Zionist should be included in my community when some Zionists are violent bigots who favor ethnic cleansing over living in peace with their neighbors; these are the people about whom Popper warned us, and they will destroy our community if we let them. And I can’t accept the common narrative that anyone who believes Israel is an apartheid state is an antisemite who should be expelled from the tent. It is clear that a great many of them are reacting to policies they genuinely find appalling — and recent (and not-so-recent) events make clear they are not alone[10] — and criticizing them in the same way any government in any free nation around the world reasonably ought to expect at times from people who have a vested interest in their policies.
As I write these words, just a few days after Tisha b’Av, I cannot help but think of the story of Kamtza and Bar-Kamtza (Gittin 55b-57a), the short version of which is that our collective failure to preserve community in a vitriolic dispute between two members of our collective ultimately resulted in the destruction of the Temple. But if there is room for debate and discussion, wherein we speak to each other respectfully rather than shouting past each other aggressively, we ought to be able to extend the Big Tent to anyone who can accept that they don’t know everything. We need to leave room for ourselves and for members of our community to make mistakes; that is how we learn and grow and pass on a robust Jewish community to the next generation.
[1] Previous essays:
What is Zionism? It Depends on Who You Ask
How We Talk About Jewish Young Adults’ Connection to Israel: The Evidence or Lack Thereof
Podcast episode:
[2] https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/allegation-israel-apartheid-state
[3] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/2024-03/an-adl-guide-to-israeli-apartheid-week.pdf
[4] https://www.jewishelectorateinstitute.org/p6815
[5] Specifically, outside of the context of the current conflict in Gaza. In that specific context, I view claims of genocide similarly to the claims of apartheid; even if you disagree vehemently, it is not difficult to understand why others might hold these views.
[6] Avot 4:1.
[7] As the Talmud teaches us in Eruvin 13b, in the context of the legal debates between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, “These and those are the words of the living God,” even when the law follows Beit Hillel.
[8] Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
[9] There is one other category of people I cannot accept in my Jewish community, though it does not come up systematically in my data: those who have harmed other members of my community and refuse or otherwise fail to do teshuvah (“repentance” and “repair”). If the perpetrator and the target of their harm cannot be in community together, our default should be to prioritize the inclusion of the target over the perpetrator, who must bear the inconvenience of seeking community elsewhere.
[10] Some examples:
https://hias.org/news/jewish-values-demand-world-averts-famine/
https://urj.org/press-room/reform-movement-statement-starvation-gaza
https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/story/statement-humanitarian-aid-gaza-and-freeing-hostages
https://www.ajc.org/news/ajc-statement-on-the-humanitarian-aid-situation-in-gaza
