POLAND & PRAGUE

Israel’s governing institutions and legal system that we fear could undermine Israeli democracy and the civil rights and religious freedoms it protects.”

Scattered push came to unified shove on March 12 when representatives of the center-right Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League (along with many progressive Jewish groups and the U.S. State Department) actually boycotted Israel Bonds’ Washington, DC fundraiser. This unprecedented act was precipitated by the group’s extending a speaking invitation to Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a rabble-rousing hatemonger who has identified himself as a “fascist homophobe,” called gay pride parades “worse than bestiality” and reacted to the settlers’ pogrom in an Arab village by saying the entire town “needs to be wiped out” (a war crime in any language).

I’m grateful to those notables who are using their platforms, pulpits and personal prestige to come to the defense of Israeli democracy. Yet the full benefits of the democracy they want to save have, in fact, only been enjoyed by Jews. So I also can’t help feeling ashamed that it took a threat to dismantle Jewish rights and Jewish freedoms to burst the balloon of romantic delusion.

It shouldn’t have taken a settler pogrom, or a clear and present threat to freedoms previously taken for granted by Jews, to rile up our leaders.

Love of Israel must be conditional. We can’t support, reward or enable the Jewish state to do whatever it chooses, without taking some responsibility when its choice is to trample on the rights and freedoms of other human beings. Here’s what conditional love looks like:

• We don’t quit lobbying for the Jewish state. We lobby for Israel and Israelis, not their current government, which seems hell-bent on dismantling the founding freedoms granted to its people in its own majestic Declaration of Independence.

• We don’t stop giving money. We stop giving undirected money to just any “pro-Israel” organization. We target our funds to entities working to secure an array of democratic institutions in Israel (free speech, press, minority rights and an independent judiciary).

• We don’t stop visiting Israel. We make sure our tour itineraries expose us to the whole truth about the land we love, not just its tech miracles and blooming deserts.

You’ve heard the expression “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” If someone we love is steering their life off a cliff, we try to stop them, redirect them, talk sense into them. It doesn’t mean we take away the car, it means we take away the car keys. We don’t want Israel to cease to exist. We just want its government to stop eroding the very foundations of its existence.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s most recent book is Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy.

OPINION MARSHALL BREGER