400 descendants of Holocaust survivor Shoshana Ovitz gather at the Western Wall to celebrate her 104th birthday. Photo: Twitter screenshot.

As we approach Israel’s Independence Day, the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora remains ambivalent. Israel is faced with constant existential threats and low-grade warfare. It is fiercely self-protective. On the other hand, American Jewry has the luxury of continuous peace, and tends toward a more liberal world view. Attitudes towards Israel have sometimes been a problem, but never more so than today.

One supposed mediator between Israel and the Diaspora is the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Did you know that, between January and March of this year, there were elections for the WZO? And that you could have voted? Probably not, because frankly, the WZO doesn’t really matter. But let me give you some background.

At the initiative of Theodor Herzl, the WZO was founded in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, at the first Zionist Congress, to spearhead the campaign for a Jewish homeland.  It faced opposition from throughout the Jewish world on political and religious grounds. But it came to incorporate a very wide range of Ashkenazi and Sephardi organizations, and saw itself as representing Jews throughout the world.

The Jewish Agency for Israel was established in 1929 as the operative branch of the WZO. In fact, it was the government in waiting for the dreamed-of Jewish state, and was run along political lines. In 1948, when Israel was established with all the powers of an independent nation, you would have thought that the Jewish Agency would disappear. But, as is typical of bureaucracies, rarely do they willingly disband — especially if political patronage is involved.

After independence, David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, had hoped that many Jews in the Diaspora would come to live in Israel. He was disposed to terminate the role of the WZO. But together with  Nahum Goldman’s World Jewish Congress, they refused to lie down. The Jewish Agency continued as a semi-state organization, but concentrated on relations between Israel and the Diaspora.

The head of the Jewish Agency was regarded as the unofficial Minister for the Diaspora. It was always a political appointment (as opposed to a meritocratic one). The result was that the Jewish Agency soon stood for inefficiency, corruption, political maneuvering, and incompetence. It became the butt of jokes.

When I was a student in England in the 1960s, the local Inter University Jewish Federation (of which I was an officer) was subsidized by the Jewish Agency and part of the World Union of Jewish Students. As a British delegate, I attended several conferences in Jerusalem, and we found the Agency people to be insufferably arrogant with little understanding of any point of view other than their own.

Years later, as principal of a Jewish school, we always needed teachers from Israel to help with both Ivrit and Jewish studies. We were grateful that we could turn to the Jewish Agency for help. They would send shlichim on two-year rotations. But few of them were capable, committed, or prepared. To make matters worse, the Jewish Agency had two rival departments of education sending staff to the Diaspora. A secular one mainly for Ivrit and Israel studies and a religious one for Torah education. Schools had to juggle and calculate the best conditions from where to get their staff.

Over the years, there have been changes both in Israeli society and the Agency. Different leaders and different programs. But it is still the same problem.

Jewish life in Israel is heavily politicized. It has absorbed so many Jews from traditional eastern and African communities. These communities, even if not always religiously strict, had no record of Reform Judaism’s quite different customs, liturgies, and attitudes — so the Reform movement’s footprint in Israel is small. On the other hand, the largest recent wave of immigrants has come from the predominantly secular ex-USSR. So Israeli religious life is a morass of conflicting standards and attitudes.

There is much in Israeli religious life (indeed in Diaspora life) that I strongly dislike and cannot identify with. I can see both the good and the terrible in extremes on both sides. But I do not accept that Diaspora Jewry has any right to interfere in Israel’s religious affairs.

Of course, it can (and should) express its disapproval. Individuals can (and should) support their preferred religious wings as they see fit. I have long argued for the separation of state and religion. I believe this would strengthen religious life in Israel rather than weaken it. But if a significant body of Israeli opinion wants an extreme (or any) brand of religious influence, that is its political choice.

This is why the WZO is increasingly redundant and counterproductive. The WZO has always delighted in grandiose declarations about Zionism, Israel, and what they think it means to be a good Jew. They use empty phrases — and even if I agree in spirit, I strongly dislike these pompous statements. In the US, there has been an increasing fight among the right and left for “control” of the WZO.

Why keep the WZO alive? Why give the opportunity for sectarian rivalry to play out within Jewish life? We should minimize such fractious encounters rather than encourage them. The Diaspora should not interfere in Israel. The amount of money wasted on the WZO could better help the Israeli poor. Israel and the Jewish world are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. Or perhaps I should say no more or less incapable.

As with repeated elections, Israel will eventually sort out its own political and religious messes in its own way. And isn’t that what we want? Or are we saying we only approve of democracy when it agrees with our views? In that sense, Israel and the US have more in common than the WZO can possibly imagine.

Rabbi Jeremy Rosen received his rabbinic ordination from Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He also studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Cambridge University and went on to earn his PhD in philosophy. He has worked in the rabbinate, Jewish education, and academia for more than 40 years in Europe and the US. He currently lives in the US, where he writes, teaches, lectures, and serves as rabbi of a small community in New York.