Former U.S. Defense Official: Israel’s Security at Risk Due to Religious Intolerance

Israel’s disregard and disrespect for the non-Orthodox Jewish movements could end up costing it the longstanding support of the United States government, a former senior defense department official with close ties to Israel warned on Wednesday.
Speaking at a session of the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs, Dov Zackheim, head of a new U.S. organization that advocates for
Jewish pluralism, noted that the 85 percent of American Jews who do not identify as Orthodox are not accepted by Israel’s religious establishment.
“Neither they nor their rabbis or leaders are recognized officially by the Chief Rabbinate of this country, which means that their marriages are not marriages, their divorces aren’t divorces and their conversions aren’t conversions,” he told the committee. "This is a major problem for us in the United States."
Zackheim, who is Orthodox, serves as chair of the Jewish Religious Equality Coalition, a broad-based coalition of American Jews and Israelis trying to promote religious diversity in Israel. The organization, whose representatives are visiting Israel this week, was created by the American Jewish Committee. Zackheim, who speaks fluent Hebrew, served as under-secretary of defense in both the Ronald Reagan nd George W. Bush administrations.
Speaking at the Knesset session, Zackheim warned that Israel was losing the support of the American Jewish community because of its refusal to recognize the non-Orthodox movements, and that without this support, its relationship with the U.S. could turn sour.
“There is no other country in the world, other than my country, that has always supported Israel,” he said. "Why? To a great extent because of the American Jewish community." Proof that American Jewish support for Israel was weakening, he said, was that many U.S. Jews today back the BDS movement, many supported the Iran nuclear deal, and not that many were upset when the United States abstained in the recent UN Security Council resolution that condemned Israeli settlement policy.