World Zionist Congress Elections

 

If you draw a Venn Diagram from my 7th grade curriculum using two circles, one for Zionists and one for Jews, most of the Jewish Circle will overlap within the larger Zionist circle.  To be sure, people who believe that Jews need sovereignty as a feature of nationhood extends far beyond my Jewish community.  It includes all but a few American elected officials.  But if you identify somebody as Jewish, it's a safe bet that their attachment to Israel coincides.  Many clumsily finesse that reality in the American political and religious landscape.  The anti-Zionists on campus can correctly assume that if they chase a Jewish student across the Quad as they shout at him with a bullhorn, they will have succeeded in harassing a Zionist.

Israel has developed over its 77 years of independence from a start-up to a nation with talented, industrious people creating an effective military, a diverse innovative economy, a place of stable institutions and infrastructure.  International alliances have been created, some high profile, others more surreptitious.  Making this happen amid their domestic and international fractures needs considerable funding, unconditional funding.  It also requires decisions on allocation.  

While sovereignty belongs to the citizens and other legal inhabitants, diaspora Jews like me get a seat at the table in the form of the World Zionist Congress.  Each year this umbrella organization elects delegates from outside Israel to sit in a forum where project allocations are decided from a variety of immense pools of money, all earmarked to benefit Israel in some way.

Eligibility to vote is pretty loose by franchise standards of most nation-states:

• Be 18
• Be Jewish
• Live legally in the USA
• Affirm support for Zionism
• Not vote for the Israeli Knesset even if eligible
• Pay $5

Voters select Slates.  The ballot offers 22 of them, each with dozens of candidates who are seated by their place in their organization's pecking order and the proportion of votes that the slate gets.

All 22 slates produce a statement of their purpose and their vision for Israel as a democratic and pluralistic entity.  Some are obvious.  In your face organizations that want to recover the Biblically prescribed borders, even displacing those already there if necessary.  The three American denominations are amply represented by offshoots of their American umbrella agencies.  And then there are niche advocates, eco Judaism, two-state solution advocates, organizations wanting their adherents to be treated in a more dignified way than they experience now amid Israel's political structure.

After reading most of the one or two-page platforms, I am not sure how to distinguish most of them, despite a high level of literacy and considerable experience with the Zionist mission and Israel's modern realities.

Will I vote?  The fee will not change my own financial position in any way.  I have a not very admirable view of the American mainstream entities.  The Conservative and Reform understandably want to have their rabbis recognized and compromises from Halacha accepted.  The ZOA and Shas don't share my priority for kindness.  As I read the platforms of each slate, a few remained as maybes.

Irrespective of what a nobody like myself thinks, the volume of people running for seats left a favorable impression. Nearly all obscure people.  Organizational Judaism, outside its most religiously observant core, has slouched considerably in the sixty years since my Bar Mitzvah.  Synagogues like mine have few members not yet on Medicare.  The American seminaries graduate people whose applications would not have passed an Admissions Committee in my early post-college era.  Despite this overt attrition and niche interests, the number of American Jews wanting to seek their place at the table affirms that Israel's advocates remain vibrant.  Many of the slates, when listing their individuals, tabulate how many are women and how many have not reached their 35th birthday.  Whoever gets the seats, usually a mixture of Orthodox variants, religious Zionists, and Islamophobics, the American Jewish community still has its critical mass of young people willing to put themselves in Judaism's arena.