Israel's Religious Left

Letter from Jerusalem

I heard this story from a man in Jerusalem: He went to one of the weekly anti-war protests with his 16-year-old daughter. As an orthodox Jew, he looks different from the stereotypical Israeli anti-war activist. But on his t-shirt was printed a quote from Maimonides, the 12th century talmudic scholar: “There is no greater mitzvah [good deed] than redeeming captives.” He wasn’t at the protest despite being religious. He was there because of his religious values. So he and his daughter joined the crowds, singing and waving photographs of the hostages and shouting, “Bring them home!”

The next morning, the girl goes to her religious school. And she doesn’t say anything about being at the protests, or about the hostages. She doesn’t dare.

She spent the evening holding up these photos and she can’t mention it, at least in religious settings.

I think this story stayed with me, in part because I’d just spent a few days in a country where it’s nearly impossible to walk anywhere without encountering these hostage photos. On bus stations. Train stations. Billboards. Fence posts.

The ones at the international airport almost feel like shrines.

What would it mean to look at these photos and not be able to talk about them with your classmates at school? Or with your teachers? What is the conversation about hostages among the religious leaders who control Israel’s government? And how might that affect the future of the war? Is there an important difference between how Israelis talk about the hostages — and the conversation we hear in the US?

I think there is.

This afternoon, the Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu will address Congress. This is a prime minister who, you may already know, is only in power because of his support from right-wing religious parties.

So I thought it might be a good time to post an excerpt of my conversation with the man whose story I started with. The man who went to the protest with his daughter and then watched her having to keep silent about it. His name is Mikhael Manekin. He’s a longtime Israeli peace activist. Twenty years ago he helped found a forum for Israeli soldiers to share stories about what they had witnessed in the occupied territories. That site is called Breaking the Silence.

Manekin’s latest project is something called The Faithful Left. It’s a small movement of religious Israeli Jews who call themselves left wing. Earlier this month, he and I met at a cafe in Jerusalem, a few minutes from the Old City. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

“The idea wasn’t to build a movement. The idea was to have an evening… 700 people ended up coming.” - Mikhael Manekin

GW: Can you tell me the origin story of The Faithful Left?

MM: Sure. So I've been an anti-occupation activist for two decades. 

GW: And wait – just define that for me.

MM: I’m against the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And also in recent years, against racial and ethnic inequality within Israel. These two things are related to each other. But the religious question was never really there… I was religious, and I was an activist. Then I wrote a book called End of Days: Ethics, Religion and Power in Israel and that sparked conversation among a whole bunch of religious activists from different sorts of struggles within faith communities. We would meet and learn together, about 15 of us. So when this government was sworn in [on December 29th, 2022], actually it was the day after, we all got on a call. We said there needs to be some sort of event to create a space where we could say, This is not who we are. The idea wasn’t to build a movement. The idea was to have an evening. One of [the organizers] said she expected 200-300 people, and we all said no way, that’s too much. 700 people ended up coming. Since then, we had another conference which had almost 1000 people. Suddenly this is another thing that's taken over my life.

GW: How would you compare the Faithful Left to the tradition of anti-war religious leaders in the US? People like Daniel Berrigan, William Sloane Coffin Jr, and of course Martin Luther King Jr? 

MM: There are a lot of communities of faith which we draw inspiration from. Some are Christian communities in North America. More I would say in South America, with the liberation theology work there. Then there’s Sufi work in Syria. There's work being done by both Muslims and Buddhists in India. Usually what connects all of these is a focus on poverty. From a faith perspective, poverty can be within your own community or within communities that you are in power relations with. So Palestinian poverty, I think of as a Jewish issue, because we have relationships with Palestinians that is a relationship of control and domination. 

GW: I reported a story on Rough Translation about a moment in US history, not that long ago actually, when it looked like evangelical Christians might take a position against climate change. They called it global warming then. But there’s a scene in that episode that I sometimes think about, where a group of self-described “eco-theologists” and environmentalist pastors, people who interpret the Bible as very pro-environmentalism, pro-stewardship, they go on retreat with some environmental scientists. The plan is to write a joint statement of support for environmental legislation, something they all pretty much agree on. But I talked to people who were there at that meeting. And the whole effort nearly fell apart because of one word: “Creation.” The religious people in the room felt it was important to use that word. The scientists hated it because to them it suggested the world had a creator. Despite their similar aims and values on the issue of climate change, the different outlook of the theologists and the scientists threatened to split them apart. What would you say are the sticking points in Israel between, say, the secular left and the faithful left?

MM: It’s a good question. I think we would need to first define what the secular left is. I think if you look at the numbers, there are very few atheists in Israel. By and large, most Israelis are to some extent traditional. More so since the seventh of October. We see that a lot of people are turning to tradition and to faith in challenging times. But that said, I think there's a there's an assumption, in some pockets of the left in Israel, that all faith is by definition negative. That the problem with the country is religion. And you hear this also all over the world, that if we could just get religion and religious people out of the way, this place can be “normal.” 

GW: I wonder if it’s suspicion of religion per se or suspicion of religious people that try to tell the rest how to live. 

MM: Yes, no, there's definitely part of that. It’s not that the left is conjuring this up out of thin air. But part of the way of remedying that and healing that is about articulating values and ideologies and virtues. I saw that in the march [of hostage families] from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We came a group of around 50 to join them.  And every couple of minutes, somebody stops you and says, you know, “Thank you for being here. It's so nice of you to be here.” And on one hand, I was a bit cynical about that. Part of me is frustrated for being put in that sort of anthropological, you know, “it’s so interesting to see somebody like you!” But on the other hand, apparently, it's important for people to see religious people at these protests. Religious people have a role to play in terms of that ethical leadership. People need that communal understanding that religion is not their enemy.

Mikhael Manekin in his Maimonides t-shirt

I remember when some on the progressive left in the US were actually tearing down hostage posters, because the idea was that talking about hostages was giving moral currency for an onslaught on Gaza. In Israel, caring about the hostages is really a way of saying we can actually end this.

GW: You mentioned that your daughter sometimes comes with you to protests, calling for the return of the hostages. And then the next day she goes to religious school, and she doesn’t dare say anything to her classmates about hostages. Because she’s worried they’ll say… what?

MM: That you're a lefty, you’re not part of our group. If you care about the hostages, you're basically on the left. What you care about is Palestinians. You're talking about that Netanyahu needs to be replaced. You're talking about ending the war.

GW: Help me understand what would be the religious argument that the moral thing to do, the Godly thing to do, is not to care about the hostages? 

MM: Let me give you an example. So I was at a Saturday protest a few weeks ago. Ironically, with my kid. And the protest was right next to a hotel, and there were a lot of religious people staying at the hotel. And then they got a glimpse of me wearing a shirt that said that the redeeming of hostages is the greatest of mitzvahs, the greatest of God’s commandments. That’s not my line, that’s Maimonides. But after that Maimonides quote there are two amendments. The first being that you can't redeem hostages for more than they are worth. It's a very ambiguous statement. But that amendment has become the rule for the religious right. So [on the edge of that protest, these religious people] struck up a conversation with us, and they said, What about that amendment? What about our great tradition of: you're not allowed to redeem hostages for more than they are worth?

GW: And what would it mean in the modern sense to redeem hostages for “more than they are worth”? 

MM: Ending the war. This is, by the way, something I think people don't understand outside of this country. How the hostage issue in this country is really a way of talking about ending the war. So in the US, for example, I remember when some voices on the progressive left in the US were actually tearing down hostage posters, because the idea was that, you know, talking about hostages was promoting the assault on Gaza, or giving us some moral currency for an onslaught on Gaza. In Israel, caring about the hostages is really a way of saying we can actually end this.

GW: So when I pass these posters of hostages – and here in Israel you pass them in every train station and bus station and in the airport and on billboards, everywhere you go, practically – do Israelis understand these photos as saying, we must continue this war until we win this war, or is the message of these posters, stop the war and [negotiate a deal to] bring them home? Or is it both?

MM: In the beginning it was both. And over time, it’s become more of a rallying cry to keep Netanyahu in the [negotiation] room until a settlement is reached. The people talking against the deal are the religious right. And they would say, obviously we all care about the hostages but it’s less important than winning the war.  And of course we know in history that there were different groups that treated hostages differently. The Roman Empire, famously, said that the minute you become a hostage, you’re basically dead.

GW: Or a traitor.

MM: Or a traitor, yes. And ironically, Jewish tradition, you know, rabbinic Jewish tradition was in response to that. So I would say, subjectively, that a lot of what we’re seeing now that this religious right is taking on itself are values which are anti-traditional. 

GW: I want to return to a question I asked before about the gap between the secular Left in Israel and the faithful left. And maybe let’s not call them the secular left but just the “Left”. Are there acts of translation you find yourself having to do to align these two groups?

MM: I think that the added value that [the Faithful Left] can potentially articulate is love for our own people that doesn’t seem bigoted. Like, it’s okay to feel tribal sometimes. That’s a natural human instinct. But tribalism doesn't need to translate into a lack of care for people who are outside of your tribe. So if I love my family, I love my community. And if I love my community, I love my greater people. And if I really love my greater people, I will also love Gazans. And the second thing for me which is closely related is the love of place. Like, I really love living in Israel. It's a holy place for me, and it's a holy place within our tradition, much before Zionism, you know, we have stories of Jews kissing the land from the first and second century, you know, and feeling the close relationship to the land. And our challenge is translating, “how do you love the land, not through domination or exclusivity?” I think that's part of what we can bring into this conversation on a faith level. 

GW: It sounds like you’re saying that for people who are steeped in a progressive tradition that demonizes tribalism, and yet who feel within themselves a community connection to other Jews or to Israel, you're able to give them the religious language to say no, actually, that tribal feeling you have is not necessarily bad or the enemy here.

MM: Yes. And not see it as some sort of challenge that we're trying to suppress or root out.

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