Longstanding tensions between the US’s progressive Jewish diaspora and the Israeli government came into focus this month, when Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other far-right Israeli legislators attended the annual Israel Day Parade in New York City.

As Smotrich, who says he is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), joined the pro-Israel procession marching down Fifth Avenue, he was met by a chorus of “shame” and “war criminals” from protesters.

Israel Day on Fifth, as the event is known, has been opposed by many in the Jewish diaspora, keen to distance themselves from Israel. With the ongoing genocide in Gaza and some of its architects on parade, the June event has been particularly controversial this year.

Smotrich remained unfazed by the calls from New York’s progressive Jewish protesters and proceeded to link the community’s destiny to Israel’s, a common mantra of both Israeli and American politicians.

“This is a massive celebration – a profound connection uniting the entire global Jewish community, bringing together Jews in Israel and Jews in the United States. This shared destiny has grown significantly stronger over the past three years,” he said. “The State of Israel is the home of the entire Jewish people. The security of Jews worldwide relies on the strength and security of the State of Israel. There is no better place to live than in Israel.”

New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani fulfilled his election pledge by skipping the parade, a move welcomed by some American Jewish organisations critical of the powerful far-right undercurrent in Israeli politics.

“The Israel Day Parade, which features Israeli politicians who have not only cheered on the genocide of Palestinians, but are part of the government committing that genocide, is not a celebration of Jewish identity or pride. @NYCMayor knows this. We’re grateful he is not attending,” said Israelis for Peace and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ).

Activists from within the Jewish diaspora in Europe and the US say they are frustrated by politicians such as Smotrich using them and their religion to justify the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank.

They included groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States and Na’amod in the UK. They say that the oppression of Palestinians is incompatible with the modern democratic values Israel claims to profess and contest the view that Israel, as a state, should be an established fact.

Against the consensus

Emily Hilton, co-founder of Na’amod, says her critical view of Israel was formulated after its 2014 assault on Gaza, specifically the military’s killing of four Palestinian children as they played football on a beach.

“I began to question the acceptance of Zionist thought from university onwards,” Hilton told Al Jazeera. “I’d met liberal Zionists who might question the politics of Israel, but it wasn’t until I went to University College London that I first began to meet Jews and Palestinians critical of Israel and what it meant.”

Hilton went on to join Jewish activist groups in the UK holding traditional Jewish mourning prayers for the Palestinians killed by Israel during the Great March of Return on the Gaza border in 2018. Later, she joined a vigil after the Hamas-led attack on October 7.

Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza has killed over 75,000 Palestinians in Gaza and altered perceptions among some in Jewish communities across the world about their links to the country.

“More people are coming to realise that we’re right, Israel has lost the moral argument,” Hilton said. “Whatever claim it once had has gone. Now, its only remaining claim is that it acts on behalf of the mainstream Jewish community, and even that is looking less certain.”

The main political threat to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, including right-wing former premier Naftali Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid, only argue over the degree to which apartheid and genocide should be enacted, Hilton said, and does not offer a better future for Palestinians.

“Claims that they’re acting in my name are, frankly, outrageous. It doesn’t matter whether it is the more polite apartheid advocated by Lapid and Bennett or the violence and destruction advocated by the current government, the problem is the system,” Hilton added.

“We need to imagine a life beyond Zionism; one based on justice and equality. The Israeli state is putting Jewish people in danger by claiming that we are somehow its foot soldiers. We’re not.”

Changing opinions

Polls from across the US and Europe show divergent views among the Jewish diaspora towards Israel. While some in the US and UK have reported feeling a strong emotional connection to Israel following widespread global condemnations of it for the war on Gaza, many are also turning away from a country they feel is enacting genocide in their name.

“For far too long, American Jewish institutions have supported the actions of the Israeli government and parroted its justification that what it did was done for the sake of Jewish people everywhere,” Sonya Meyerson-Knox, Communications Director of Jewish Voice for Peace, told Al Jazeera.

“In doing so, they not only engineered support for the Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide of Palestinians, but they also silenced and excluded Jews who opposed these actions, or tried to hold the Israeli state accountable for its war crimes.”

A majority of American Jewish institutions continue to support Israel, Meyerson-Knox says, despite a “sea-change” among the American Jewish community as a whole.

Support for Israel’s existence had long been an established point of consensus among the vast majority of the global Jewish diaspora, analysts told Al Jazeera. But Israel’s three years of offensives in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Iraq – killing tens of thousands of civilians – has forced many to question that view.

“For years, the issue of Israel has been a point of consensus among Jews in the UK and the US. That’s becoming less so,” Keith Kahn-Harris, a sociologist and fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research told Al Jazeera. “[It has] exposed how many of the decades-old points of consensus of what Israel was were really not fit for purpose.”

He said despite the centre-ground consensus on Israel being in decline, and growing anti-Zionism sentiments among the youth, we are still not at a stage where mainstream Jewish communities question the future of Israel as a state. “They’re there, but they’ve got a long way to go,” he added.