Hotovely in hot water

THERE are new frictions between the Israeli government and American Jews, after a deputy minister suggested that the US community can’t grasp the issues facing Israel.

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely questioned in an interview whether “people that never send their children to fight for their country” could understand the “complexity” of the Middle East. Most US Jews, she said, don’t have children who serve.

During an English-language interview she said of American Jews: “Most of them are having quite comfortable lives. They don’t feel how it feels to be attacked by rockets, and I think part of it is to actually experience what Israel deals with on a daily basis.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly harangued the deputy minister – one of his personal recruits to the Likud party.

His office released a statement saying that he “condemns Tzipi Hotovely’s offensive remarks regarding the American Jewish community”.

The statement continued: “The Jews of the Diaspora are dear to us and are an inseparable part of our people. There is no place for such attacks, and her remarks do not reflect the position of the State of Israel.”

But some Knesset members complained that the PM didn’t go far enough. Nachman Shai, chairman of the Knesset lobby for US–Israel relations, said: “It is not enough for the Prime Minister to condemn and reprimand the Deputy Minister, it’s appropriate that she should be removed from her post.” American Jews, Shai said, “do not need lessons from her”.

The head of America’s Reform movement Rick Jacobs even claimed that if a US politician had made the comments, “we would not hesitate to call them out as anti-Semitic”.

Jacobs, who is angry about the fact that the Israeli government has halted plans for a section of the Western Wall meeting his movement’s demands, said that Hotovely’s comments are a “new low” in the “litany” of Israeli government steps “denigrating” Diaspora Jewry.

Apologising for her comments, Hotovely claimed that her words were taken out of context, and that she was simply saying that Israelis have a better perspective on their country’s challenges than Jews elsewhere.

“The difficulty in understanding the reality in the Middle East for people who do not experience the daily reality of Israel really is great,” she said.

“The gap stems from a different reality of life. This is the basis for the distancing between American Jewry and Israel.”

NATHAN JEFFAY