Major US and British Jewish Organizations: Good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?

My sister, Emma Clyne, is the chairman of the Jewish Society at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) in London and as detailed in this blog from The Guardian she has run into trouble with other Jewish student organisations in Britain due to her efforts to host a panel discussion on the impacts of nationalism on Jewish identity. She has also tried to keep the SOAS J-Soc a purely cultural/ religious Jewish organization that is not unquestioningly pro-Israel.

By "not unquestioningly pro-Israel" I mean just that. the SOAS J-Soc does not aim to be anti-Zionist, they are simply trying to present the kind of dialogue and range of opinion that is present within Israel itself. Not surprisingly there has been hell to pay as well as some attention in national media.

Having attended Columbia University during the widely publicized MEALAC/ Columbia Unbecoming controversy I am both heartily sick of and intimately familiar with the kind of major Jewish campus organizations that like to cry anti-Semitism as soon as anyone says anything negative about Israel. (And in the process losing any credibility when trying to bring attention to the anti-Semitism that actually does exist within some quarters.) For some reason, it seems that on British and American campuses it is not ok to express an even remotly critical opinion of anything Israeli. Of course this leaves us with a climate in which Zionism, Israel and Israeli policy can never be discussed in any real sense of the word, not even within Jewish groups, and certainly not in dialogues between Jewish and Arab students.

Not only is this tiresome in the extreme, and strangely unlike Israel, where debates of this kind are completely acceptable, it also stifles any possible exchange of ideas and development of possible solutions to the present problems in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Has the Jewish tradition of debate and discussion been undone — at least in Britain and the US — by a desire to defend Israel at every turn? And why do American and British Jews feel this way when Israelis don't? Is it some sort of guilty conscience over not being in Israel? If so I suggest we get over it pronto.